Subtle changes, bugs and feedback

no, I checked what I could and I see that there was no comment created for the conversation. this is rare as you obviously know this a multi-step orchestration (so it is fragile) done by the client (the frontend of the website)... but it implies that there was a momentary network issue between the frontend and the API that occurred during the orchestration.

Theres no telemetry in the app, but the Google console tells me there are 40-50 active users.

The app has it's own thread: https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/390575

Downloaded and installed :)

The web logs on the load balancer show a request was made to create a conversation, no request was ever made to create a comment.

The web logs from the Django show the request to make the conversation, but doesn't show a request to make a comment. There's no Python stacktrace so no error was encountered.

Conclusion: microweb did this, and the 2nd request to create the comment was never made.

It's not the mobile app.

Replying to posts fails when apple’s private relay is turned on. It just says the server stopped responding- when I turn the relay off I can post normally.

I was just trying to post links with 'blob:' at the beginning that Microcosm doesn't parse correctly as links. They don't seem to work without 'blob:':

https://www.lfgss.com/comments/17202232/

Sample link:

Posted without formatting:

blob:https://planapps.london.gov.uk/5231996d-­65a3-4fc2-bd56-8df3ed568bb9

Posted as a link:

blob:https://planapps.london.gov.uk/5231996d-­65a3-4fc2-bd56-8df3ed568bb9

I don't really know what 'blob:' is, and it's probably not important, as I imagine links like that would get posted only rarely, but just to flag it up.

blob: is a uri scheme, similar to http FTP sftp gopher and others.

It's not defined within the security library as being a safe uri scheme so the link is removed.

I've no idea what program/app is supposed to be activated on clicking a blob link, do all browsers understand it?

Quick research says that they're used internally within browsers by JavaScript to avoid the browser acting on the data and trying to render it.

Doesn't look like something I should add support for.

If you got it from your browser doing something you might want to screenshot and upload instead

Yes, no idea on all of that. It just came up because I wanted to link to the GLA planning portal. No idea why it uses that. If you leave 'blob:' off, the URL doesn't work. I can well imagine it being insecure and abused as a feature in certain contexts--perhaps to mask what people are clicking on? Screenshotting wouldn't work so easily for the longer document, as it's lots of pages. As I said, it's not important; people who want to read boring planning documents will be able to c&P the full URL and be confident it's not an unsafe link. Thanks for looking at it, though.

it probably means that their website has composed the object dynamically within the client using JavaScript, and so the file actually doesn't exist... you need to link the page you can link, and then instructions to find the file... or download from there (as the browser will have it composed) and then upload to here

Screenshotting wouldn't work so easily for the longer document, as it's lots of pages

"print to PDF" is your friend

Ah yes, uploading would be better, you're right. And having just checked and tried to c&P the blob: URL, it doesn't work any more, so whatever it is that it linked to must have expired. C&ping worked fine last night.

Also, Microcosm seems to have inserted '%C2%AD' into the URL when I c&p it, but it doesn't work with this removed, either.

Planning portals are often odd--this one doesn't seem to allow direct links to planning documents. I have no idea why. It also generates these documents as 'document.pdf', so you have to rename them all the time, which is a pain.

I'll navigate back to them to upload them and will remove the bonkers URLs.

Also, Microcosm seems to have inserted '%C2%AD' into the URL when I c&p it, but it doesn't work with this removed, either.

The app is shit :shrug

That is standard URL encoding and should break nothing https://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.ASP the characters you cite represent UTF-8 whitespace which is not valid in a URL and must be encoded.

I did save them as PDFs, yes.

Post corrected with attachments added.

https://www.lfgss.com/comments/17202232/­

Thanks for all the comments!

Interesting, I didn't see any spaces in the original link, so is UTF-8 whitespace invisible? The original link seemed to have only ASCII characters.

Very hard for me to guess things based on assuming what you've seen. I am simply saying that those characters are valid, desired even, and represent whitespace in the URL which is invalid.

Not applicable to this case, but the addition of the ­ character in URL text probably isn't needed anymore with:

a {
    word-break: break-word;
    hyphens: auto;
}

I'm not sure if microcosm applies the same logic to all URL strings or just those with long strings of non-spaced text, but this should work with normal sentence links too, since it should split on the spaces first, only falling back to breaking long words when there's no other opportunity.

just applies it to all text TBH.

agreed it's probably no longer needed, I haven't tried it recently (last 5 years).

when originally added, a decade ago, the support for word-break was inconsistent and experimental. when it worked it tended to be too aggressive, breaking words when wrapping and leaving some whitespace would be better. I added the ­ so that I could avoid all of the aggressive breaking of words, and still avoid breaking layout due to lack of breaking on long strings... long strings because URLs are just one example, gibberish long strings also broke layout (and on vBulletin was always a way someone could troll a page)

Edit: oh... we do the breaking of long words every 40 characters in HTML Text nodes. it's not applied to anything within HTML.

a decade ago

you can't be serious… that doesn't seem like very long ago at all

just applies it to all text TBH

Ah, I did not realise this. Word break might work anyway, but it's fine how it is to be fair, probably not worth the effort to test it 🙂

you can't be serious… that doesn't seem like very long ago at all

might be even farther into the past TBH, I first added it to vBulletin but it was less of a problem there as the fonts were so much smaller that I was breaking lines at 50 chars and so it affected fewer strings.

Whenever I open a new page on my iPhone 15 it automatically brings up the keyboard as phone seems to automatically think I’m typing in the page number at the top of the page. Is this an iPhone or LFGSS issue, and does anyone have any recommendations for fixing it? Restarting phone and tweaking safari settings hasn’t helped.

1 Attachment

Delete remembered passwords from your password manager for lfgss.com .

It is some kind of "password manager" + "Safari" bug.

Thank you very much - that has sorted it.

I'm possibly in the wrong thread.... but I'm desperately looking for a list of the various text formatting options available esp. underscore, strikethrough.... I couldn't see any pinned post anywhere.
(Please forgive the non-techy pleb.)
And yes, I did make use of the search function.
TIA

You can use markdown
https://www.markdownguide.org/cheat-sheet/
and HTML tags
https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_formatting.asp