Giant stone statues shrink Recent Activity

September 21, 2007 8:29 PM

When this post shows up in Recent Activity, the long small-text quote gets truncated, the <small> tag is never closed, and the rest of Recent Activity is rendered small.
posted by flabdablet to Bugs at 8:29 PM (19 comments total)

I seem to recall bringing that one up a long time back, but I was pretty sure had Matt fixed it. Odd.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:43 PM on September 21, 2007

I was pretty sure it was fixed too. Huh.

I've just attempted a crude hack. Lemme know if that has fixed it.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:45 PM on September 21, 2007

:)
Sorry..
posted by Chuckles at 9:02 PM on September 21, 2007

I get that from time to time. Pretty regularly, actually.
posted by The Deej at 9:20 PM on September 21, 2007

Also, I guess I should mention (to make you all jealous?), the only problem in my Recent Activity page is that the alignment of my username is messed up for that post. Everything else looks exactly how it should be.

Except that Recent Activity really should have coloured backgrounds, of course..
/Shameless
posted by Chuckles at 9:37 PM on September 21, 2007

Unbalanced closing tags? Ewwww! But they do the job for me.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20061201 Firefox/2.0.0.6 (Ubuntu-feisty)
posted by flabdablet at 11:50 PM on September 21, 2007

Actually they only almost do the job. You might want to put a </blockquote> right after that </small>, because I'm still seeing the alignment issue Chuckles mentions. But, like, ewwww.
posted by flabdablet at 11:54 PM on September 21, 2007

Unclosed tags in Recent Activity did go away for a while, but they've reappeared recently. Maybe the tag-closing code was changed when the code to strip bad tags was recently altered (the red smiley face thread).
posted by Aloysius Bear at 3:25 AM on September 22, 2007

this has been an issue on mefi ever since "my comments" was introduced, and it has been discussed ad nauseum on meta, never to have been fixed
posted by caddis at 5:03 AM on September 22, 2007

Or not.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:14 AM on September 22, 2007

maybe
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:18 AM on September 22, 2007

it has been discussed ad nauseum on meta, never to have been fixed

I think the consensus is that a situation like this breaks something once every few months and it's easier to have us just fix the excerpt than to code something that will do some closing tag haxie magic so that it doesnt happen in each and every case.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 5:20 AM on September 22, 2007

THAT'S MADNESS.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:22 AM on September 22, 2007

Sure, it's easier. But, ewwww.
posted by flabdablet at 6:28 AM on September 22, 2007

the "small" tag is never closed

Stop using the small tag. Really. It's pretty pointless, especially in the example cited.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:34 AM on September 22, 2007 [2 favorites]

I will kill you with my mind.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:50 AM on September 22, 2007

Too late, the 21st century did that two years ago.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:12 AM on September 22, 2007

So was the actual thread ever broken? If Recent Activity got messed up while the thread didn't, and both need to close unbalanced tags, then why can't the same code be used in Recent Activity as is used in the threads?
posted by philomathoholic at 4:59 PM on September 23, 2007

philo, the original thread was never broken; why the tag-balancing code didn't work in this case is unknown so far, because there has been the functionality previously. We have just done some tinkering (see the Gary Exploit thread a few days back), but I'm not sure this is related; it might have gotten borked at any of a half-dozen other things in the last couple months.

So the reason why it can't is that, well, it actually probably totally could be. But pb just had a kid, so, heh.
posted by cortex (staff) at 5:25 PM on September 23, 2007