Backwards comments page

December 11, 2006 4:32 PM

Everyone who has posted in this thread has a backwards comments page, in most browsers anyway.
posted by Mwongozi to Bugs at 4:32 PM (35 comments total)

Mom! I cut my leg open while playing with that knife you said not to use! Can you do something?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 4:35 PM on December 11, 2006

!8971;O8971;
posted by soundofsuburbia at 4:38 PM on December 11, 2006

dammit i suck
posted by soundofsuburbia at 4:38 PM on December 11, 2006

To be fair, Safari users (like me!) wouldn't have had a clue it was going to happen, since the trick doesn't work on Safari.
posted by Mwongozi at 4:41 PM on December 11, 2006

HA! That's funny.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 4:43 PM on December 11, 2006 [1 favorite]

I posted in that thread, and my comments page looks fine to me (in FF - the reversed comments are reversed). Perhaps it only effects people's comments page who didn't manage to post the UNICODE char?

That is, there's a cool double reversal goin' on?
posted by freebird at 4:43 PM on December 11, 2006

I am totally pissed to have missed out on this party.
posted by sdrawkcab at 4:44 PM on December 11, 2006 [2 favorites]

Freebird: Your comments page looks backwards to me. (In Camino/Firefox.)
posted by Mwongozi at 4:45 PM on December 11, 2006

Ah, never mind - it doesn't effect the "My Comments" page, but does the simple listing. HA!

Presumably we can clean up our own mess by pasting the correct UNICODE.
posted by freebird at 4:46 PM on December 11, 2006

I won't paste any live UNICODE here for fear of making it worse, but the guy made it sounds more tricky than it is with his blank cut/paste. It can be represented as a simple HTML entity (& # 8238 ;)

and to turn it off you should be able to just paste the matching entity (& # 8237 ; ).
posted by freebird at 4:50 PM on December 11, 2006

It's screwing people who only have posted plain text in the post. It would be pretty easy to abuse this power by posting say a single backwards period in a post.
posted by Mitheral at 4:53 PM on December 11, 2006

I am totally pissed to have missed out on this party.

Yeah, I was hoping you and uosuaq or whatever his name is would see it.

I've asked Matt to append my post with the 8237 code and see if it stops the favorites/comments madness.
posted by loquacious at 5:02 PM on December 11, 2006

I think the LRM entity just needs to be removed from the post itself.
posted by freebird at 5:06 PM on December 11, 2006

No! It's so nerdly and pretty!!
posted by loquacious at 5:07 PM on December 11, 2006

True enough - maybe if the RLM entity is added afterwards? My theory is that it's not actually our comments, it's the stuff in the post string, based on where it happens and where it doesn't.

It seems like the whole "voodoo" of the blog post just encouraged a workaround which (unintentionally to us) circumvented the entity-stripping code when commenting.
posted by freebird at 5:11 PM on December 11, 2006

What if you post an even number of times? Does the comment page go back to normal?
posted by kcm at 5:27 PM on December 11, 2006

You know what, I think it's because the my comments and front page surround each post with a div, which I think kills the backwards thing while your comment history is separated by a bunch of line breaks within a single div.

I'll surround the history with a div.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 5:27 PM on December 11, 2006

:)
posted by caddis at 5:49 PM on December 11, 2006

the smiley is for Matt's good sense of humor about this
posted by caddis at 5:49 PM on December 11, 2006

(:
posted by freebird at 5:53 PM on December 11, 2006

I flagged the thread as noise because it aggravated my headache. Yes.
posted by weretable and the undead chairs at 5:59 PM on December 11, 2006

See, this is why we can't have nice things.
posted by oxford blue at 6:01 PM on December 11, 2006 [2 favorites]

So does this mean we can have the gmi tag?
posted by mr_crash_davis at 6:14 PM on December 11, 2006

Does the piss travel back up into the elephant in the gmiages?
posted by Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese at 6:23 PM on December 11, 2006

i was checking out the 9/11 thread, and the towers stood back up. then planes shot out of them.
posted by quonsar at 7:08 PM on December 11, 2006 [3 favorites]

Stay away from this thread, then, quons.
posted by Eideteker at 7:12 PM on December 11, 2006

All I did was read the post in firefox... and now my popular favorites page is backwards.
posted by Bistle at 7:47 PM on December 11, 2006

My popular favourites has gone wacko too!
posted by cholly at 8:03 PM on December 11, 2006

Are people wearing shoes on their hands? Are hamburgers eating people? I think not.
posted by blue_beetle at 9:14 PM on December 11, 2006

?yrrow I dluohS .nekorb gnihtyna deciton t'nevah I
posted by arto at 11:10 PM on December 11, 2006

Presumably this did not happen with the bdo method used by ph00dz
posted by Joeforking at 1:38 AM on December 12, 2006

I've only been here ten minutes and everything's umop apisdn.
posted by No Mutant Enemy at 7:21 AM on December 12, 2006 [2 favorites]

fixed.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 7:20 PM on December 12, 2006

thank you
posted by caddis at 7:23 PM on December 12, 2006

The popular favorites page is still broken.
posted by grouse at 7:06 AM on December 15, 2006