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When your global inbox contains chat pings, those links are only valid from the popup. When you click on Go to full inbox it takes you to a page where all the chat links have been rewritten from something like:

to something like this, where it is suddenly http: instead of https: and going to a hostname that Chrome is saying DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN to for me on a Mac:

That link does not work because bonfire.stackoverflow.com does not resolve via DNS lookup, or at least, not in Chrome's eyes:

Screenshot of Chrome failure

Running nslookup gives this strange thing for me:

mac(tchrist)% nslookup bonfire.stackoverflow.com
Server:     192.168.0.1
Address:    192.168.0.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
*** Can't find bonfire.stackoverflow.com: No answer

While running dig on that host says this for me:

mac(tchrist)% dig bonfire.stackoverflow.com

; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> bonfire.stackoverflow.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 48334
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1410
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;bonfire.stackoverflow.com. IN  A

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
stackoverflow.com.  1800    IN  SOA damian.ns.cloudflare.com. dns.cloudflare.com. 2363484188 10000 2400 604800 1800

;; Query time: 46 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.0.1#53(192.168.0.1)
;; WHEN: Mon Jan 27 19:37:31 MST 2025
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 115

I've also tried this with Safari and Firefox, and both report the same problem. For example:

Screenshot of Safari failure

Anybody know what's going on here?

All I can think of is that either my local DNS is really messed up or else that it may be somehow related to the security measures introduced by Slate's post about Preventing unauthorized automated access to the network dated 2024-09-19 16:28:06Z. I searched that post for Bonfire and while it's mentioned several times, I don't understand what's going on there.

My browser is not "crawling" Bonfire looking to index chat messages. I'm just clicking on the chat message link from the Go to full inbox page, and it's way broken for me when I do that.

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3
  • 2
    I can replicate this error (burn this comment after reading)
    – Journeyman Geek
    Commented Jan 28 at 3:30
  • 3
    Bonfire is the codename for chat and it has been used as a subdomain at some points in the dev testing environment. Some configuration got applied wrong? This particular subdomain isn’t being used anymore but you can see it does exist in DNS: bonfire.dev.stackoverflow.com
    – user1114
    Commented Jan 28 at 3:42
  • 1
    Norepo with messages from chat.mse. Maybe only happening for chat.se?
    – user1114
    Commented Jan 28 at 4:07

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
9

Oops, thank you! Fixed now.

This was a really (reeeeeeaaaalllly) old default value that snuck into the configuration here. Jeremy is of course correct, Bonfire is our internal code name for Chat, but we've never used that bonfire.stackoverflow.com domain outside of testing.

This issue only happened on stackexchange.com because the broken configuration only applied to applications that have already been migrated to the cloud, and of the relevant apps, stackexchange.com is the only one. (The fact that Chat is also already migrated didn't actually matter in this case).

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