Comment post preview acting weird October 30, 2006 10:54 AM   Subscribe

Preview and final post modes have diverged. I keep seeing complaints, after munged or garbled messages, about how 'it looked fine in preview!' [bit more inside]
posted by Malor to Bugs at 10:54 AM (18 comments total)

If it's possible, the Preview Post button should put the text through *exactly* the same code that the main Post button uses. I understand the live-preview thing probably can't work that way, running in the browser and all, but the incorrect server-side preview is resulting in noticeably more screwed-up posts than it used to.

I'm too lazy to go find some to link without knowing I need to, but if you haven't seen this yourself, I can go scare up some examples.
posted by Malor at 10:55 AM on October 30, 2006


Sigh, I got my terms a bit confused. I'm talking about comments, rather than posts. The Preview button versus the Post Comment button. The FPP process is fine, I think.
posted by Malor at 10:57 AM on October 30, 2006


Malor, I find it hard to believe that this will be a productive or useful post without actual examples.
posted by delfuego at 11:04 AM on October 30, 2006


Site's really slow, I'll try to find some examples later.
posted by Malor at 11:09 AM on October 30, 2006


The process that parses verboten stuff out (like image tags, hard returns, bracketed text, control-codes, etc.) is not reflected in the Live Preview or the regular preview. You don't need to give examples. We've all seen people complain about it.
posted by crunchland at 11:19 AM on October 30, 2006


Fine I'll make sure the preview page runs the same text filter stuff. It's an oversight that they got out of sync.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 11:58 AM on October 30, 2006


Cool, thanks much. I think maybe my tone sounded a little harsher than I intended. Sorry if it sounded snippy!
posted by Malor at 12:58 PM on October 30, 2006


Two posts diverged in a yellow link
and sorry I could not preview both
And be one account...
posted by cortex at 2:50 PM on October 30, 2006


now you went and spoiled it for us Malor. did it ever even occur to you that SOME OF US HAVEN'T SEEN THE FINAL POST YET???
posted by quonsar at 3:58 PM on October 30, 2006


LOL, I'm such a rude bastard.

If there ever is a Last Post, I bet it'll be a pissing elephant. :)
posted by Malor at 5:09 PM on October 30, 2006


I have seen at least three comments today where the poster says "it looked fine in preview, I don't know why X is messed up", when X, in fact, is fine.

FWIW
posted by niles at 5:33 PM on October 30, 2006


OK, I'll bite. How can you possibly know it came out as they intended?
posted by AmbroseChapel at 2:57 AM on October 31, 2006


AmbroseChapel: It's mainly been things like code, where they say I don't know why my formatting is messed up, but it looks just like I would format it. One person (I don't recall the thread) even repeated the code, said it looked fine, but it was identical to the original comment.

Point taken, however. I assumed it was fine because it didn't have the nasty left align and other hallmarks of botched formatting.
posted by niles at 10:54 AM on October 31, 2006


The thing I've seen recently is "br>" at the ends of lines, as in something like

if( x == y ){br>

which you might have missed on a casual glance. The left-hand side normally looked OK.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 12:33 PM on October 31, 2006


I believe part of the problem may be that different browsers fail differently for malformed entities and such—Firefox might guess and put in a missing semicolon on render whereas IE did not, say—and the behavior of Live Preview may further be independent of browser. So the muddle could lead some to see correct code on posting where others see incorrect, for a conflation of browser, mefi, and user error reasons.
posted by cortex at 12:38 PM on October 31, 2006


Off to find an example...
posted by AmbroseChapel at 3:49 PM on October 31, 2006


That didn't take long.

This post exhibits the phenomenon and is followed by the traditional "Damn! Looked fine on preview".
posted by AmbroseChapel at 6:30 PM on October 31, 2006


shoot..you win. I did not notice the broken break tag. However, I wonder if cortex isn't correct on some of the other ones I've seen. I've certainly encountered the Firefox-fixing-of-HTML before.

(that was the exact post I was thinking of originally)
posted by niles at 9:34 PM on October 31, 2006


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