Bug Hunting

This page looks badly formatted to me in Chrome and FF:
http://www.lfgss.com/conversations/137854/#comment6200877

Anyone else have everything over to the right?

Yep same for me, corrects itself on the 8th comment

Old comments may be an issue for the Markdown parser.

The comments were in BBCode format, and that is parsed to Markdown, and then to HTML.

Unfortunately somewhere in the middle of that, neither the BBCode parser or Markdown parser checks whether the output is balanced (well-formed) HTML.

And what happens, usually with quoted lists, is that a blockquote can be caught inside of a list item... which breaks the HTML.

It's not pretty... I need to do some work to create a balanced tree from the output of each stage. Until then, I'm manually fixing the comments that are raised to my attention.

I decided to quit fixing it by hand and to write regular expressions instead.

If you are not afraid, you should be.

Fixed.

And painfully the server now needs to re-generate all the HTML for all of the comments.

Ho hum.

...

Seem to be missing email notifications for PM replies again ?
(apologies if this is a known bug?)
(and yes I have it turned on in notification settings)

Hate regular expressions, never been taught so each time i have to apply them its a googlethone

http://www.debuggex.com

If you edit your username to one that is already in use.
You get given your user account id instead.
eg: user_48963

Warning message would be nicer.

Added as a bug: https://github.com/microcosm-cc/microweb/issues/266

@Velocio Not exactly a bug but remember that hosts file you suggested using in one of the mobile threads or maybe the Encrypt Everything thread?
This one: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/

Could it be blocking some of your money makers? What do you call 'em? referal sites

Like which appears in Google's sponsored links a lot and I'm sure I've seen on here http://www.awin1.com

It could, and I have commented that line out on mine.

The internet stops working if you block things too aggressively. For someone who wants to get to the end page, commenting out that line, or temp disabling adblock is the only way... after all, the full URL isn't on the page.

I realise that, I just wanted to make you aware of it. You might want to mention it if you suggest that hosts file to peeps maybe?

What I've been doing instead is sending updates to the hosts file maintainer.

I think there's a clear difference between intrusive adverts and tracking that we don't consent to receiving. And the items that we explicitly visit and realise we're going to be tracked on.

i.e. If we're clicking through to a web site that is a shop, I fully expect the shop to place a cookie and track me (in fact, most shops don't work without it). But if I haven't explicitly clicked through to something... then I'll be damned if they should place a cookie.

So yeah, I attack it at source... even without the revenue for Microcosm, I want some things to carry on working, fairly sure others do too.

Yeah, I'd left it for ages but just happened to be editing hosts to test servers behind a load balancer so thought I'd finally mention it (and comment the 'awin1' one out). Any others that you know are in use I should let through?

That's the only one.

The other they've already removed (the eBay rover.ebay.com one).

They seem to think that some adverts are served from the awin1 domain, and it is possible that Affiliate Window do this. But that's not how we use it.

@WillMelling made a snide remark skillfully directed toward me.
I was impressed enough to wonder if he had posted anything else similarly iridite

If you click his profile it shows 4 conversations.. which I assume means he has started four discussions.

But if you then search for them
type:conversation authorId:82436

Only one is returned..
Not sure if its a bug or maybe he deleted three of his authored discussions.
Even if he has.. still not sure if its a bug

If you click his profile it shows 4 conversations.. which I assume means he has started four discussions.

But if you then search for them
type:conversation authorId:82436

Only one is returned

The sum of items created and comments made is a total of all such things that have not been deleted or moderated regardless of whether or not you have permission to see them.

The search results are the result of the things that you have permission to see.

Thus, if you made a sum of all comments for all forums, you may notice that it does not match the number of comments on the home page. Why? Because you don't have permission to see them all.

Every forum has permissions, and some are private (or semi-private... just not full public).

No answer is given as to which items are not public.

And it is not considered a bug, as the metrics are merely to show a level of contribution to the community at large, rather than the individual contributions themselves.

Isn't that a bug tho..?

@WillMelling may have expected not only the content of his private posts would not be known by inquisitive folk like me.. but also their very existence in the first place.

No, it's not a bug.

The contents are not known to you because you don't have access to all of the forums, but that doesn't make the contents or existence of any messages "private" to everyone nor require any secrecy about them. The contents are in fact, "public". It's just that you don't have access to them.

The stats are not calculated as being the total from each individual's perspective, the stats are just the total things in any area that isn't private messaging. This is for performance, and it is not a bug.

There are many real world examples of software being vague, or plain incorrect, on numbers and other things for performance reasons. The software is behaving exactly as it was designed. Whether it's Google saying there are 50 results and only actually having 17 results, or whether it's some report in the financial service sector that is using an approximation only.

The difference is whether it is more important to be accurate at the potential cost of never being able to give an answer, or to return a vaguely meaningful approximation of an answer at the cost of being accurate.

Accuracy goes out of the window fairly early on in any system designed to be distributed, as consistency itself cannot be guaranteed.

And so it is here. We chose not to be accurate, and to return a potentially incorrect naive sum that almost certainly does not apply to all viewers of the page, as we determine that rendering the page within a second or so is better than potentially not rendering the page.

It is not a bug, and it will not be modified.

Search is so shit at returning what I actually want, ive started using google instead.

I can't find this thread using lfgss search.. its like it lives in a black hole.

This is aside from the server contention woahs.

Server Error We're sorry, there was a temporary error when we tried to
process your request.

The reason was: The search query took too long and has been cancelled

Click here to go back to the homepage.

Hmm, actually search is doing precisely the right thing, but other permissions are not doing the right thing.

Fixed.

If you're banned from a specific forum, then not only does the forum disappear from all listings (along with all items... hence it not appearing in search), but direct links to items also enforce the ban.

And yes Tommy, you've been banned from a few sub-forums on the site, some as a result of others, but this one by me. The advantage though, is that by banning you from the areas that you troll, any non-trolling and positive contributions you make elsewhere are still fine.

the 'page x of y' box doesn't work for me. This thread for instance, if I put '5' in the box then press return, goes to page 1