They're fluoridating our water and embedding sound files in our pages!!!

January 18, 2001 7:46 PM

They're fluoridating our water and embedding sound files in our pages!!!

First of all, it's fucking hilarious. Let's get that out of the way right now. And it's perfect for a "light" thread like this. I don't know the exact technical mumbo-jumbo that got it in there or who put it there (was that you, Matt?), but rock the house.

But. I didn't think it was possible to do such trickery on MeFi. If it was Matt's doing, then there's no real problem. However, could any user do this? Say, if there was a thread ragging on Dubya (Here? On this page? Heaven forbid!), could someone embed a sound file of W mangling English? Is it possible for some really CLEVER guy to embed that JPG with W. side by side with chimpanzees? (Because I need to see it AGAIN, because I certainly haven't gotten it through email about five billion times!)^*

Just curious.

^* You see, George W. Bush has been pillored in the media because he is supposedly not intelligent! Therefore, comparing him with a chimpanzee is quite humorous, especially when they happen to have similar facial expressions! Get it? Get it? GET IT?!?!?
posted by solistrato to Etiquette/Policy at 7:46 PM (9 comments total)

capt.crackpipe embeded the background sound with this piece of code:

{bgsound SRC="http://www.dailywav.com/0900;a/scientst.wav"}

substitue the { and } with < and >

it seems its pretty easy to insert html in mefi.
posted by tamim at 9:19 PM on January 18, 2001

i know the original thread post is filtered, but i don't think comments are.
posted by pnevares at 9:59 PM on January 18, 2001

There's nothing stopping anyone from coding in sounds or dropping in graphics in any thread. But it's highly frowned upon, if for no other reason than tradition. All that junk slows page-load times and breaks up the flow of the page.
posted by aaron at 11:56 PM on January 18, 2001

But ya gotta admit it was hilarious.
posted by Optamystic at 12:27 AM on January 19, 2001

Yeah. All of those things are possible. It's just that most people don't make use of those possibilities.

At the moment, you're right, it's still in the "amusing" stage.

Whiles go by, and metafilter will have to find some way to deal with the abuses that will inevitably occur.

posted by lucien at 1:36 AM on January 19, 2001

Yeah, you can enter anything and have it get parsed, even nerfarious javascript code if you want.

If it becomes a problem, I was planning on stripping out all html and only allowing link a href's, italics, and bold tags.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 11:18 AM on January 19, 2001

This kinda goes to what I was asking about in this other thread. What HTML should count as "safe"? I think just A HREF, B and I is too limited. I think most of the standard text-structuring tags should be OK:

A
B I TT BIG SMALL SUP SUB CITE STRONG EM BR & SPAN
BLOCKQUOTE PRE HR H1-6 Ol UL DL (etc.) & DIV
(and abitrary CSS)

Those all seem pretty safe, and useful. Tables, forms and IMG are on the bubble, but I think they should be an option. The image in the Id al-Fitr thread last month, for example, was nice touch. It's proprietary tags (like BGSOUND), embedded content (OBJECT, APPLET, EMBED) and conceivably SCRIPT (because you can use it to mess with the DOM and rewrite the page's CSS, etc.) that seem likely to mess up the MF experience for many users.

posted by rodii at 1:18 PM on January 19, 2001

Matt, I would hope you would at least also still permit underlines as well as italic and bold. I use all three for different kinds of emphasis at different times.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 1:32 PM on January 19, 2001

He did that with a BGSOUND tag? IIRC that should only be valid in the document header, not in the body. No big surprise that IE isn't too strict about it, though...
posted by kindall at 11:13 PM on January 21, 2001