Tweaks and Quirks

It’s time for Dave’s annual “tinker with the database” session. Read on for the latest round of stuff he broke.

The only thing that really changed is the tag. Now, instead of having to highlight a spoiler, you should be able to merely move your mouse over a “spoiled” chunk of text and it’ll appear automatically, through the joys of JavaScript.


There’s a bunch of kooky back-end/database stuff that you hopefully won’t need to be concerned with.


There’s a little quirk, in that if you post a new comment that’s a reply to an old comment, it may look ugly. Fortunately, this will cease to be a problem in a few days when old articles have drifted away. Since the problem will go away in a few days, I’m probably not gonna bother to fix it…


Oh yeah, HTML in comments is disabled. Despite my best efforts to the contrary, I couldn’t completely lock it down from kooky XSS exploits. Those of you that used it, sorry.


This thread is now about all the other things that are horribly broken with the site, feature requests, and playing with the spoiler tag.

39 replies on “Tweaks and Quirks”

  1. Showing Off
    This is the new spoiler tag. Here’s some stuff that got spoiled. (There’s text in there, "promise.")

    • Re: Showing Off with tags

      This is the new spoiler tag. Here’s some stuff that got spoiled. (There’s text in there, "promise.")

      • Re: Spoiler Text Color
        Is there any way you could make the spoiler text something other than black on black (like, say, green on green)? That way there would be something filling the gap to indicate that text is there. I’ve had posts where I didn’t know there was spoiler text because it just looked like blank space.

  2. just futzing arround
    first line

    just skipped a line

    wrap wrap wrap wrap wrap wrap wrap wrap wrap wrap wrap wrap wrap wrap wrap wrap wrap wrap wrap wrap wrap wrap wrap wrap wrap wrap

    nowrapnowrapnowrapnowrapnowrapno
    wrapnowrapnowrapnowrapnowrapnowrap
    nowrapnowrapnowrapnowrapnowrapno
    wrapnowrapnowrapnowrapnowrap

    Edited by Dave – please don’t bleep with my tables kthx

    https://bureau42.com/

    https://bureau42.com

    this is a cool site

    [email protected]

    bold, underlined, italics.

    will quote text

    and colorize your text if you wish.

    And my personal favorite: , which will make the text black (on the black background). Readers can still "see" it if they want to

    • Re: just futzing arround

      nowrapnowrapnowrapnowrapnowrapnowrapnowrapnowrap
      nowrapnowrapnowrapnowrapnowrapnowrapnowrapnowrap
      nowrapnowrapnowrapnowrapnowrap

      Hey, way to break my table layout. :D

      • Re: just futzing arround

        nowrapnowrapnowrapnowrapnowrapnowrapnowrapnowrap
        nowrapnowrapnowrapnowrapnowrapnowrapnowrapnowrap
        nowrapnowrapnowrapnowrapnowrap

        Hey, way to break my table layout. :D

        testing a new insert feature

      • Re: Me Too

        What about HTML entities:

        You probably won’t get them, sucks to be you.
        (Actually, when previewing this, my browser properly rendered the © in the text box, which is weird, but we’ll see if it warrants more digging around in the code.

        • Re: Me Too

          What about HTML entities:

          You probably won’t get them, sucks to be you.
          (Actually, when previewing this, my browser properly rendered the © in the text box, which is weird, but we’ll see if it warrants more digging around in the code.

          Curiouser and curiouser. (Note that it shows up with bonus gibberish, and when I post this it’ll be a weird mystery icon, at least in Firefox.)

    • are backslashes being messed up?
      dave said something about "n" characters, i think he was trying to type: ‘\n’ (as in newline)

      did he have a typo, or did the slash get yanked?

      find out in a second…

      interesting my backslash is gone, what happens if i do an escaped (double) backslash: ‘\\’ ?

      …how about 12 backslashes in a row: ‘\\\\\\\\\\\\’ ?

      Null Character: \0 ?

      …something funky is going on

        • Re: are backslashes being messed up?

          here: ‘\\’

          Hm. I’m not sure if it’s a problem with posting, or with viewing, this may take a bit of work. HAY LETS SPAM UP THE DB.

          • Re: are backslashes being messed up?

            here: ‘\\’

            Hm. I’m not sure if it’s a problem with posting, or with viewing, this may take a bit of work. HAY LETS SPAM UP THE DB.

  3. HTML still affects preview
    It seems that if you put HTML in the subject of a comment, and then preview, the preview page isn’t escaping the HTML. but once it’s acctaully posted, the html is striped.

    This might confuse people who may think HTML is allowed in Subjects.

    • Re: HTML still affects preview

      It seems that if you put HTML in the subject of a comment, and then preview, the preview page isn’t escaping the HTML. but once it’s acctaully posted, the html is striped.

      This might confuse people who may think HTML is allowed in Subjects.

      Oh hey, a legitimate bug, I’ll look at it this evening.

      • Re: HTML still affects preview

        It seems that if you put HTML in the subject of a comment, and then preview, the preview page isn’t escaping the HTML. but once it’s acctaully posted, the html is striped.

        This might confuse people who may think HTML is allowed in Subjects.

        Oh hey, a legitimate bug, I’ll look at it this evening.

        Okie, now I’m just silently stripping tags from subjects, because <I>leaving them in</I> like this will just make things even more ugly.

    • Re: But the author tools!

      Dave, when do we get preview on new articles??

      Meh. You can edit posts, learn to cope. :)

      (I could just copy the comment page and file off a few bits, but I rewrote the whole darn thing to use the vB parser exclusively. If you can’t do HTML in article bodies, that’ll break all of fiziko’s templates and he’ll come down from Canadia and kill me with physics.)

      • Re: But the author tools!

        (I could just copy the comment page and file off a few
        bits, but I rewrote the whole darn thing to use the vB
        parser exclusively. If you can’t do HTML in article bodies,
        that’ll break all of fiziko’s templates and he’ll come down
        from Canadia and kill me with physics.)

        I’ve needed an excuse to update most of them, anyway. I do
        wonder how to display the square brackets, though. (I also
        wonder if I’ll ever need to.) I’ve never used SuperTags
        for anything, but they seem pretty simple. Perhaps I’ll
        have to try them in an article this weekend.

        Is there a way to make the supertags do bulleted lists,
        like I use in the DVD and comic columns?

        • Re: But the author tools!

          I’ve needed an excuse to update most of them, anyway. I do
          wonder how to display the square brackets, though. (I also
          wonder if I’ll ever need to.) I’ve never used SuperTags
          for anything, but they seem pretty simple. Perhaps I’ll
          have to try them in an article this weekend.

          Is there a way to make the supertags do bulleted lists,
          like I use in the DVD and comic columns?

          The code I stole has a [list] tag but it looks a bit broken. I’ll twiddle it around a bit and see what I can do.

          Also, as long as whatever you’re typing [doesn’t match an existing tag] you can use [all] [the] [brackets] you like.

          Nothing quite like using a live site for teaching yourself the intricacies of regexp.

          • Re: But the author tools!

            I’ve needed an excuse to update most of them, anyway. I do
            wonder how to display the square brackets, though. (I also
            wonder if I’ll ever need to.) I’ve never used SuperTags
            for anything, but they seem pretty simple. Perhaps I’ll
            have to try them in an article this weekend.

            Is there a way to make the supertags do bulleted lists,
            like I use in the DVD and comic columns?

            The code I stole has a [list] tag but it looks a bit broken. I’ll twiddle it around a bit and see what I can do.

            Also, as long as whatever you’re typing [doesn’t match an existing tag] you can use [all] [the] [brackets] you like.

            Nothing quite like using a live site for teaching yourself the intricacies of regexp.

            Hm… also, looks like fiziko’s browser might be sending extraneous \n characters or something, because his text has line breaks (that I’m guessing he didn’t put in) but mine is all long and stuff. Weird. More stuff for me to look at.

            • Re: But the author tools!

              Hm… also, looks like fiziko’s browser might be sending extraneous n characters or something, because his text has line breaks (that I’m guessing he didn’t put in) but mine is all long and stuff. Weird. More stuff for me to look at.

              The comment form uses wrap="physical" which was an old netscape extension that was deprecated and has undefined behavior in a lot of browsers.

              You could probably just use wrap="soft" … of course, if you really want to switch to CSS completley i’m pretty sure the whole "wrap" tag isn’t valid xhtml now. but honestly i gave up trying to understand most of the new w3c standards back in 2004.

  4. Change Request
    While you’re making changes, could you please increase the number of articles in the RSS feed from seven to a higher number? Now that there are more postings, it not unusual to have articles scroll off the bottom after just two days.

    I was using HTML quite a bit–sorry to see it gone.

    ____________________
    Check out Chad’s News

    • Re: Change Request

      While you’re making changes, could you please increase the number of articles in the RSS feed from seven to a higher number? Now that there are more postings, it not unusual to have articles scroll off the bottom after just two days.

      I was using HTML quite a bit–sorry to see it gone.

      RDF bumped from 7 to 10. Nice round number.

      Also, sorry ’bout the HTML, but one clown kept sneaking in XSS ‘sploits and I got tired of deleting eir comments.

  5. Nice Changes
    I guess I’ll just have to learn to live without html. Still this spoiler tag is fun.

    Also, I like the animated icon for Lost – are the other genre shows going to get their own icons too, or is someone planning on starting to review Lost?

    • Re: Nice Changes

      Also, I like the animated icon for Lost – are the other genre shows going to get their own icons too, or is someone planning on starting to review Lost?

      Anything for which I can really quickly easily find a small graphic, or for which someone sends me a suitable graphic, I’ll probably do it.

  6. You’re futzing with style sheets, which is nice. :)
    But don’t you think the message subjects are awfully large compared to the teensy tiny article text? :) I would shoot for a happy medium, unless somewhere each individual user can select their font size preferences and I missed it somewhere along the line.

    The spoiler tag is pretty damned cool, and the background is dark grey, which makes the spoilerized text stand out. :)

    A bracketed i does italics.

    Gosh, with avatars and groovy giffy emoticons this will be just, well, groovy.

    • Re: You’re futzing with style sheets, which is nice. :)

      But don’t you think the message subjects are awfully large compared to the teensy tiny article text? :) I would shoot for a happy medium, unless somewhere each individual user can select their font size preferences and I missed it somewhere along the line.

      It musta been a transitive thingie, cuz now everything is back to normal. Nevermind.

      -Joe

      • Re: You’re futzing with style sheets, which is nice. :)

        It musta been a transitive thingie, cuz now everything is back to normal. Nevermind.

        Yeah, well, we don’t have things like "development servers" ’round these parts. If I want to tinker, I have to do it on the "real" site.

        (For those who missed it, earlier this evening, I was tweaking style sheets, F5’ing like a madman, trying to get a few things twiddled around. My long-term goal is to reproduce, as closely as possible, the current layout, but with more style tags all over the place, so that eventually we can do things like theming the hell outta the site.

        Note, however, that I know approximately nothing about style sheets, so there’s a bit of trial-and-error involved. :D

  7. Spelling error on the SuperTags page.
    The description for the new spoiler tag mentions "ousing" over it.

    • Re: Spelling error on the SuperTags page.

      The description for the new spoiler tag mentions "ousing" over it.

      So what’s wrong with that? :)

      Joe

    • Re: Spelling error on the SuperTags page.

      The description for the new spoiler tag mentions "ousing" over it.

      :-P

      fixed.

  8. Spoiler tag in Articles?
    I noticed the spoiler tag in the recent BSG article uses the old "highlight-to-read" effect. Is this an effect of being posted while the old spoiler tags were still in effect, or will all article spoilers use the old style?

    • Re: Spoiler tag in Articles?

      I noticed the spoiler tag in the recent BSG article
      uses the old "highlight-to-read" effect. Is this an effect
      of being posted while the old spoiler tags were still in
      effect, or will all article spoilers use the old style?

      The articles are still being posted with HTML. I’ve asked
      Dave not to switch them to SuperTags until we’ve got
      working list and header tags, at which point I can switch
      over all of my templates. I’ve also asked if there’s a
      way to ignore hard returns unless they come in pairs, as my
      browser inserts hard returns at every line wrap
      automatically. (Widen your window, and my comments will
      stay skinny.)

Comments are closed.