Display bug in My comments.

December 19, 2005 9:05 PM

My comments, how I love thee, let me count the bugs.
posted by Eideteker to Bugs at 9:05 PM (30 comments total)

Sorry to add another bug, but someone forgot to escape a <small> tag in a comment, and now the entirety of My Comments from that point on is in small (excepting the title headings). I see that the thread itself is not small, so perhaps some of the HTML-escapingness can be added to My Comments.
posted by Eideteker at 9:06 PM on December 19, 2005

Yes! Please make this change. One small bit of carelessness with the small tag and the whole page goes small.
posted by caddis at 2:52 AM on December 20, 2005

In a thread in which you did not participate, caddis complained I had not closed my small tags in a comment I posted there. I write my tags out before I put any quote between them, so this came as a surprise. I double checked the comment in question via View Source just to make sure. The tags were closed.

Yet caddis complained about the same thing after the next comment I made. I looked again and again everything seemed fine. After checking just now, however, I see that while the first comment is closed properly, the next comment I made is not. There are two open tags at the start of the quoted text but only one closing at the end. How that happened is a mystery to me but I have to assume it was my error. My apologies to all. However, considering I did, as far as I can tell, close the tags in my first comment, it seems to me there may be a bug of another order.

At any rate, until this is sorted out I am avoiding using small tags at all and attempt to use them very sparingly thereafter. And I will doublecheck any tags I write from now on.

Upon review, I see caddis's comment. Well, I have to take credit for the second comment but the first one is a baffler to me.
posted by y2karl at 2:59 AM on December 20, 2005

please don't be coy, tell us which thread you're all talking about.
posted by jessamyn at 5:09 AM on December 20, 2005

is it fixed now?
posted by jessamyn at 5:11 AM on December 20, 2005

It was the alcoholic housing thread. I put a close small tag into each of my two comments about tags. However, I think y2karl is right. The second one clearly lacks a closing tag, but the first one looks fine. Nevertheless it through the whole My Comments page into small text. Rather than fix these on a case by case basis, can Matt just write in the same code that is used on the rest of the site. I am not sure how he does it, but leaving out the tag to close small text does not affect the next comment anywhere on Metafilter except the My Comments (and perhaps My Posts) page.
posted by caddis at 5:44 AM on December 20, 2005

"threw" aaaggh (now if we could just automate out stupidity)
posted by caddis at 5:46 AM on December 20, 2005

It's not fixed. Everything below this comment is small. The line "Here is an interesting passage therefrom:" is the last line at full size.
posted by Eideteker at 7:52 AM on December 20, 2005

well fuck it. I've closed all the small tags that I can find and my tolerance for scrolling up and down through multi-hundred word "excerpts" has come to an end. We can see what mathowie can do with it. Sorry.
posted by jessamyn at 9:09 AM on December 20, 2005

Don't forget to put a quarter in the swear jar.
posted by y2karl at 9:48 AM on December 20, 2005

It's a bug in My Comments, not a code error on y2karl's part. The My Comments page only grabs the first 8k characters from a comment, so one of those excerpts is so long that it exceeds that, so the end of the comment (and closing tag) are gone.

I'll check into the My Comments page today and try and fix that up, but it's not an error on y2karl's part at all.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:56 AM on December 20, 2005

fuck the swear jar.
posted by jessamyn at 10:05 AM on December 20, 2005

that depends on the size of the jar.
posted by BorgLove at 10:31 AM on December 20, 2005

feisty librarian: must be all the heat coming from the feds.
heh
posted by edgeways at 11:26 AM on December 20, 2005

Thank you Matt.
posted by caddis at 11:37 AM on December 20, 2005

I have a question, Matt. Why in the rest of the site does a failure to close tags not affect subsequent comments but in My Comments it leaves the whole rest of the page small. I appreciate fixing the one issue, but sometimes people just plain forget to close their tags. How is this handled differently in the rest of the site and can it be ported to My Comments?
posted by caddis at 11:40 AM on December 20, 2005

caddis : "Why in the rest of the site does a failure to close tags not affect subsequent comments "

Not true. I've seen formatting spillovers in quite a few threads, due to unclosed tags.
posted by Gyan at 11:53 AM on December 20, 2005

caddis, I just explained above that comments are getting cut off, so the closing tag (and say, several paragraphs of content in a comment) are being cut off, so it appears to the end user like a tag wasn't closed.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:02 PM on December 20, 2005

Ok, I upped the limit, let me know if y2karl's thread is still borked in My Comments.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:03 PM on December 20, 2005

Ook, I upped zee leemit, let me-a knoo iff y2kerl's threed is steell burked in My Cumments.

Bork Bork Bork!
posted by y2karl at 12:11 PM on December 20, 2005

I still have it borked after the alcoholism thread.
posted by Iamtherealme at 12:20 PM on December 20, 2005

fuck. well, it'll be a while to fix.

note to y2karl: please don't excerpt entire books in small fonts, no one can read them, even if they wanted to.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:25 PM on December 20, 2005

Matt, y2karl's second comment was missing a close small font tag. When viewed in the main thread that didn't affect subsequent comments, but when viewed in My Comments it left the rest of the page in small font. Sometimes people just forget to close that tag (I know I have) and it's not just borked getting into My Comments. My question is why does it not affect the main thread but does affect My Comments?
posted by caddis at 1:00 PM on December 20, 2005

When you post a comment through normal methods, there is a little post-processing going on with the close tags and the remove-bad-tags and whatnot. When you chop off a comment at 8000 characters, it just truncates and doesn't do the close-tags hula [because it would need to do it for every truncated comment which would probably have some impact on server load]. I guess theoretically this 8000 limit could chop a comment in the middle of an anchor tag with equally disastrous results. The close small tag is a red herring. When I went back and closed all the open small font tags, it was still broken because the 8000 character limit was between the open small tag and before the close small tag. This then made the "my comments" page act like small all the way down, hence my swearing. Does that make sense?
posted by jessamyn at 1:55 PM on December 20, 2005

yes
posted by caddis at 1:59 PM on December 20, 2005

note to y2karl: please don't excerpt entire books in small fonts, no one can read them, even if they wanted to.

I will endeavor to quote, sans small tags, well within the limit from now on. Feel free to delete the quotes in the thread affected.
posted by y2karl at 2:32 PM on December 20, 2005

Matt, y2karl's second comment was missing a close small font tag

Link to the comment please? I looked over a dozen comments and didn't find anything missing.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 2:53 PM on December 20, 2005

I never saw a missing close tag. I understand the 8,000 characters thing. And yes, it's still broken for me.

Thanks for all the detective work.
posted by Eideteker at 3:34 PM on December 20, 2005

Matt, it was this one, but I bet Jess took care of it, both y2karl and I both saw it on View Source. I must have been mistaken about leaving open a tag, I just tried it up thread and your code automatically closed it upon posting. I guess what I have been seeing were big posts the got borked going into My Comments, although I could swear I screwed up a thread a while back with an open small tag and then closed it later. In any event, sorry for the confusion.
posted by caddis at 4:37 PM on December 20, 2005

and just to be clear what I saw in that post, two small tags at the beginning of the quote and one closing small tag at the end.
posted by caddis at 4:47 PM on December 20, 2005