High ascii causes problems on posting

December 9, 2003 9:36 PM

I don't know if this question is acceptable for this section, but I really am curious - what I am doing wrong ?

I have prepared a post for Metafilter (my first), and while it displays perfectly on preview, when I post it a not-so-nice error appears. Could anyone help, please ?
posted by Masi to Bugs at 9:36 PM (10 comments total)

The text of the post is here [TXT], the post on preview here, and the result of pressing Post - here.

What could I do so that I would not encounter this error ? Thanks!

I sincerily hope I did not break any policy by asking this; if I have, please accept my sincere apologies.
posted by Masi at 9:37 PM on December 9, 2003

It looks fine (no accented or special characters or anything)...maybe try again?
posted by amberglow at 9:41 PM on December 9, 2003

yeah, it looks fine, Masi. i've seen similar errors before for no reason. just try and repost it. (though i'd open a new browser to do it rather than BACK or reload, which may double post it.)
posted by dobbs at 9:47 PM on December 9, 2003

Well, I did try again. I've made the post about a week ago, and since then it gives me the same error, which leads me to believe that it is something in it that is not OK. I suspect it may be « that is not liked by the posting script.

But then, why would it look OK on preview?
posted by Masi at 9:51 PM on December 9, 2003

you could try it without the alt text, and put that in a (more inside)
posted by amberglow at 9:52 PM on December 9, 2003

It would be different on preview because it doesn't go to the database on preview.
posted by holloway at 10:00 PM on December 9, 2003

I think it's the high ascii symbols in your title tags. Also, this is a bug post about MetaFilter, and should be in MetaTalk, not here. I'm going to move it to MetaTalk tomorrow.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:26 PM on December 9, 2003

Might be helpful if you pasted the actual error message?
posted by fvw at 6:57 AM on December 10, 2003

i don't know the data width of the metafilter database, or how the links and stuff are set up, but it's either your html is too long (since it's a truncation error) because of your alt tags (like on qahwah)

man....4270 characters in your descriptions...that might be it if the descriptions aren't BLOBs.

...or it's because of your « tags...which makes sense, considering they're functionally equivalent to quotation marks in some languages.
posted by taumeson at 4:49 PM on December 10, 2003

but apparently AMF can handle « tags, which uses the same DB as MeTa, which is assumedly the sme type of DB as MeFi. i'm guessing the description field just can't handle 4270 characters.
posted by taumeson at 4:51 PM on December 10, 2003