Forum Comments and Issues Repository

[Chinner17]

This is SChin testing (Chrome) on a non-developer account on the Live server as the testing server was not reproducing the issue for me. [Linebreak]

This is the first line after a linebreak.

This is a double shift+enter line to see if that changes anything
and another single shift+enter [Linebreak]

Hopefully I can reproduce this issue.

[omgFIREBALLS]

Let's see...

Crud, I had hoped the maintenance was because you had figured out how to fix it, but I still have the problem (though at least now I know how to circumvent it). My theory breaks; your post would have been bugged if it held.

I may be editing this post on occasion, trying to find some other cause.

I have now tested it in Chrome/Firefox on both my laptop and my desktop and encountered the problem without fail in every case (and Chrome in both cases has no extensions). I even considered that it could somehow be my ISP/network that was to blame, so I made the laptop use 4G instead, but that wasn't the problem either. I'm running out of even bad guesses here. Update: Chrome on phone - still getting it.

I made a fresh account and it also has the bug. Do we need a programmer or an exorcist at this point?

Edited November 8, 2022 by omgFIREBALLS

[Great Balls of Fire]

Testing on another account.

[SChin]

Hey Fireballs,

I appreciate you providing us all this additional data!  The forums going down was actually us doing a rather sizable backend update and we have a bit more to do for tomorrow, but sadly I don't think that will fix the issue.  There is, however, another Invision forum update (the service we use for these forums) available for us to push Live, but we need to get our database up to date before we can.  We should hopefully have all that stuff updated by the end of the week, but I'll still be testing things out in the meantime.

If you learn anything else, please don't hesitate to continue letting us know

Thanks again Fireballs!

-SChin

[Fionavar]

Thanks, indeed!

If Admin is having trouble replicating, omgFIREBALLS, if you have time, can you try seeing if you can replicate in an Incognito Mode with your Antivirus disabled and cache/history cleared? Since this is clearly an issue, but one that is not (gratefully) widespread, I am wondering about plugin and/or AV complications. As well, what OS are you running?

[omgFIREBALLS]

I am running Windows on my desktop and laptop. My phone is an Android. I am really struggling to see that there should be something in common here, as I think that was the first time I ever accessed these forums on that phone, as well as while using Chrome on desktop/laptop (and I can't imagine I've been here often on the laptop either, certainly not as logged in on this account). I always use Firefox - Chrome is just what I fall back on if I suspect Firefox might be having issues with a site, so that history is almost blank by default. I am not using any services to share browser info between devices. Yet if my account itself were to blame, it'd be the strangest luck that a fresh account would have the same issue. I even lied about my birthday, so we can't blame the curse on that either.

I'd thought that I was alone in getting these linebreaks and that they (or the forum's handling thereof) were to blame, but clearly it isn't that simple. Nevertheless, maybe we should get the word out that only using shift+enter linebreaks will probably protect you from the bug. And now, I am in incognito mode on Chrome, everything cleared, AV disabled, and trying a linebreak plus another line of text... if you see more text after this, it worked.

Spoiler alert: Nope, failed. By the way, to be clear, I can see already when I submit the post if it will bug or not. There is this brief moment between pressing save and the edited post appearing, during which I can see the post-linebreak text disappearing from the editbox.

Edited November 8, 2022 by omgFIREBALLS

[omgFIREBALLS]

Pardon the extra post, but I am now trying a US proxy to see if you have cursed Swedish IPs or something. However, in this proxy window, I cannot edit my previous post. Here goes: Extra line!

Well, that just didn't include the linebreak, so I cannot say that it really worked... also, I wouldn't read too much into this behavior as this proxy was more like a browser-in-browser with various oddities. Couldn't get a traditional proxy to work though.

Edited November 9, 2022 by omgFIREBALLS

[majestic]

Switch your keyboard layout/input language to English/US and try again. It would be strange for the issue to occur on both Windows and Android, but it's one of the only things left that most likely is the same on your phone and your computer.

Also... try Edge for a moment. It's just Chrome without Google stealing your data these days, so it's worth a shot.

Edited November 8, 2022 by majestic

[Bartimaeus]

It should be noted that at least with U.S. standard keyboard layout, holding down CTRL while pressing enter immediately posts your post; I know this is because I never click the "Submit Reply" button. Don't know if it's helpful information at all. (Also, SHIFT+Enter does single line returns instead of the weird double line returns that became the standard when the forum software """upgraded"""" several years back, if you need them for some reason.)

Edited November 9, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[omgFIREBALLS]

14 hours ago, majestic said:

Switch your keyboard layout/input language to English/US and try again. It would be strange for the issue to occur on both Windows and Android, but it's one of the only things left that most likely is the same on your phone and your computer.

I already tried that, though I didn't document it. So anyway, it's not this either.

Oh, but... the problem appears to be gone. Yay! Maybe that ctrl+enter trick was involved...

Edited November 9, 2022 by omgFIREBALLS

[Azdeus]

Let's see what my normal Firefox window does, will it break?

I don't know.

[Azdeus]

Going to celebrate with some more coffee!

[omgFIREBALLS]

Hang on, @Azdeus is Swedish too and also had the problem? It's a conspiracy and/or a hilarious bug.

[Sarex]

It's a well known fact that this forum has nothing but disdain for the inferior Scandinavian country... and Europe...and the rest of the word for that matter.

[SChin]

So are you telling me the issue just stopped happening?  I feel like that happened to someone else prior as well.  While confusing, I suppose that does provide a bit more data for the issue.  I'm going to keep taking a look at this while I can so it doesn't happen to other people in the future.

Thanks for all the help with this posting issue everyone  

[Azdeus]

Well, I haven't really done any extensive testing;

 

so I don't know if it's a random fluke that had it working normally or not, but...

I've not changed anything on my computer.

 

 

[InsaneCommander]

With all this maintenance yesterday, I thought for a moment that Elon Musk had bought the Obsidian's Forums and I had to pay $8 to access it again. Or perhaps that anime avatars were considered parody.

[rredmond]

[Checks to see if @InsaneCommanderhas been banned for life]

Edited November 9, 2022 by rredmond

[majestic]

4 hours ago, SChin said:

So are you telling me the issue just stopped happening?  I feel like that happened to someone else prior as well.  While confusing, I suppose that does provide a bit more data for the issue.  I'm going to keep taking a look at this while I can so it doesn't happen to other people in the future.

Thanks for all the help with this posting issue everyone  

From the described behaviour I still would not rule out a language issue - both affected accounts most likely ran Swedish versions of Windows and Android with potentially Swedish browser translations, even if switching the keyboard layout did not work. A "browser window inside a browser window" changed the behaviour of the line breaks, and submitting without hitting the submit button through CTRL + enter seems to have avoided the issue altogether (although that perhaps simply was coincidence and it is hardly testable now that it appears to be fixed).

Maybe 'Submit' runs some sort of pre-check or does otherwise something that simply removed everything past the line break from the input field or the string respectively, like interpreting a line break as the end of the string (I don't see how that should be the case with any modern programming language, but I have seen stranger things happening). It would also fit the impossible to reproduce and randomly occuring dreaded post eating where submitting a post does absolutely nothing when there's some bug that cuts or otherwise drops input based on something that is a combination of post length, thread activity and whatever else (certain post elements in a thread seem to make it worse), as some threads are more affected than others.

It could also be a validation issue that, but that seems unlikely - at least with the mangled post (now this isn't entirely applicable because Inivsion IP is based on PHP IIRC, but for backends written in C# data models can have automated validations that are then returned to the view with error messages if they fall through, but they still need to be shown - the behaviour would be similar to the eaten posts if the input fields would also be cleared). The posts missing entirely might fall through some server side validation without giving out errors. Does the forum software come with some form of input sanitization routines or validation that might cause this? Seems strange, because the missing posts usually go through if simply copy/pasted again, but it is impossible to rule out some form of issue that simply does not get copy/pasted in some manner.

Edited November 9, 2022 by majestic

[majestic]

By the way, ever since the maintenance, the forum feels rather unresponsive. It is the same with two different ISPs, and it is not the transfer of the content that is slow as pages with loads of embedded videos or images load with no significant delay once there's a response from the server. Opening a page of the video game screenshot thread takes as long as loading any forum thread index. It's not a bandwidth issue. It also doesn't look like analytics or AWS slowing access down, which has been an issue in the past at times where the status bar in the browser would read "loading data from analytics.google.com or aws.something.or.another (i.e. user attachments )" and then hang for a bit.

I wonder if that is the same for anyone else?

[Fionavar]

32 minutes ago, majestic said:

By the way, ever since the maintenance, the forum feels rather unresponsive. It is the same with two different ISPs, and it is not the transfer of the content that is slow as pages with loads of embedded videos or images load with no significant delay once there's a response from the server. Opening a page of the video game screenshot thread takes as long as loading any forum thread index. It's not a bandwidth issue. It also doesn't look like analytics or AWS slowing access down, which has been an issue in the past at times where the status bar in the browser would read "loading data from analytics.google.com or aws.something.or.another (i.e. user attachments )" and then hang for a bit.

I wonder if that is the same for anyone else?

Thanks, majestic. Yes this has been noted. Hopefully Admin can find a tweak to help address this

[omgFIREBALLS]

17 hours ago, majestic said:

From the described behaviour I still would not rule out a language issue - both affected accounts most likely ran Swedish versions of Windows and Android with potentially Swedish browser translations, even if switching the keyboard layout did not work. A "browser window inside a browser window" changed the behaviour of the line breaks, and submitting without hitting the submit button through CTRL + enter seems to have avoided the issue altogether (although that perhaps simply was coincidence and it is hardly testable now that it appears to be fixed).

Yeah I don't think it was the ctrl+enter thing. I've been submitting normally with mouse clicks since. I doubt that was the cursebreaker, and it's definitely not something I need to keep doing (if I ever needed to).

Also, my software is never in Swedish if I can help it (but it seems some mobile app creators cannot even imagine I wouldn't want to use Swedish ). Until this little debugging session, I had been posting here strictly on my desktop computer, which runs an English version of Firefox. Edit: My Windows language is also English (but Swedish on the laptop).

One thing I tried while debugging was to copy/paste Chinner17's post at the top of this page, and I got the same buggy behavior. Yet, when pasting it into my text editor, it looked just as I expected with the symbols for enter and shift+enter linebreaks.

Edited November 10, 2022 by omgFIREBALLS

[Gorgon]

A

[Gorgon]

So, I'm back to only being able to post the first line

[majestic]

Is @Totally not Gorgon too?