Server Error in a invite link on some mobile phones

[OliverViking]

Describe the bug

I have a invite link with infinite uses and a expiry date of 1 day (url: invite/fFdblk). When opening it up on my iOS phone I get the "Server error" page, and the error:

{
  "code":500,
  "error_msg": "This is an unhelpful error message for a miscellaneous internal error."
}

I've tried multiple different mobile browsers on iOS, none of them work. I also have a report from one of our users saying they have the same issue on their Android phone with the Chrome browser.

Server logs:

Jan 24 16:16:45 MSCChat writefreely[2628]: ERROR: 2020/01/24 16:16:45 database.go:2278: Failed selecting invite: Error 1267: Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8mb4_general_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation '='
Jan 24 16:16:45 MSCChat writefreely[2628]: ERROR: 2020/01/24 16:16:45 handle.go:508: [Web handler] 500: Error 1267: Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8mb4_general_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation '='
Jan 24 16:16:45 MSCChat writefreely[2628]: 2020/01/24 16:16:45 Web internal error render
Jan 24 16:16:45 MSCChat writefreely[2628]: 2020/01/24 16:16:45 "GET /invite/fFdblk%!F(MISSING)0%!F(MISSING)%82" 500 2.979818ms "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 13_1_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) FxiOS/21.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/605.1.15"
Jan 24 16:16:45 MSCChat writefreely[2628]: 2020/01/24 16:16:45 http: multiple response.WriteHeader calls

Steps to reproduce (if necessary)

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Generate a invite link
2. Open up the invite link on a mobile phone

Expected behavior

Should allow the user to sign up using the invite link

Application configuration

• Single mode or Multi-user mode?: Multi-user mode
• Database?: mysql
• Open registration?: no
• Federation enabled?: yes

Version or last commit: v0.11.2

[thebaer]

Hey, thanks for the report! Based on the logs, it looks like you're actually requesting the page with a few extra characters on the end of your URL, shown here:

"GET /invite/fFdblk%!F(MISSING)0%!F(MISSING)%82"

The %!F(MISSING) is caused by Go -- you're probably requesting /invite/fFdblk%0%82 or something like that.

We can improve this to not fail so poorly in WriteFreely. But for now, I'd double-check your URLs and see if that works.

[OliverViking]

Thanks for the quick response!
You're right! It seems like Rocket.Chat's mobile app was including a 😄 emoji in the url when tapping it. (Even though there was a space between the emoji and the url)

Seems like this is more of an issue with their app then.

Would probably still be good to provide a better error message or something.

[thebaer]

Got it! Great to know :)

Yeah, I'll leave this issue open so we can fix the error state.

Thanks again for the report and fix confirmation.