“Critical Error” When Trying to Post on Gear Swap

I just dropped into BPL for the first time in a while, trying to list a few bits of gear for sale, and ran into the same error. The first time I tried to post to the Gear Swap I ended up at BPL’s version of a 404 page – something like We led you off trail or whatever. I checked Gear Swap to make sure my listing hadn’t been created anyway – it hadn’t – and backed up the browser to try again.

That second time, I ended up at a Critical Error screen, same as what you’ve described, Ben.

Well, turns out that despite the ‘Critical Error’, my posting got saved and listed anyway:

https://backpackinglight.com/gear-swaps/fs-msr-wind-pro-2-barely-used/

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

… But no photos survived the saving. So I guess I’ll take Brandon’s approach and add photos incrementally now.

Sorry for the multiple replies here, but actually … this is worse than no posting at all.

Now my Gear Swap post is listed as Closed and I am unable to edit it further. There is no price, no images, no post author (hi, it’s me 👋🏻) and meanwhile the My Content section of my forum profile shows no Gear Swap postings.

I’d appreciate some help getting this cleaned up please 🙏🏼

To both of you: please submit a support issue on this by sending an email to helpdesk@backpackinglight.com. Include a link to the corrupted listing, and attach all of the exact image files you tried to upload to the listing.

We think this error is related to posting multiple large images in a listing. For now, we have limited a gear swap listing to one main image, as a test to see if this resolves this particular issue whereby a listing becomes accidentally corrupted.

So please feel free to try to break it from here, and we’ll see what happens 😎

I got the same error, when posting my GC trip report. I think there are now three versions of it.  Two with ‘Critical Error” that resulted in a trip report with no photos and no ‘by’ that were caused by trying to upload more than 1 photo. To get it done I needed to create a tip report without photos and edit my trip report 42 times to upload each of the 42 photos individually. Exhausting! A fix for this would be highly appreciated. Btw. having all the photos bunched together in a ‘photo gallery’ doesn’t do trip reports justice – please enable ‘insert image’ within the text for trip reports.

For what it’s worth, I’m able to reproduce 2 flavors of this problem:

1. When creating a new Gear Swap post from scratch, and attaching too many / too large images, I can elicit a Critical Error which has already been discussed.
2. If I’ve already created a Gear Swap post and I’m adding images to it (too many / too large) then this situation results in a 502 Bad Gateway response.

Because I’m a software engineer and that gives me the mistaken impression that I can be the hero here 😄 I did a bit of googling. You guys are on WordPress, I believe? You might take a look at this:

https://xomisse.com/blog/fix-http-error/

… And particularly solution #7 regarding the memory limit.

Obviously I have no idea if you’ve already tried this before, or have other plugins that may be impacting the image upload. But if it comes down to total file size in the images that users are attempting to attach to posts, this memory limit seems like a reasonable first culprit.

For whatever it’s worth!