patrick.net

The characters "“inspiration”" appear in the post. In hexadecimal the post is
C3 A2 E2 82 AC C5 93 69 6E 73 70 69 72 61 74 69 6F 6E C3 A2 E2 82 AC C2 9D.

The offending characters are codes
C3 A2 E2 82 AC C5 93 before "inspiration" and
C3 A2 E2 82 AC C2 9D after "inspiration".

C3 A2 should be rendered â, the Latin lowercase letter a with cricumflex.
E2 82 AC should be rendered €, the Euro symbol.
C5 93 should be rendered œ, the Latin lowercase ligature oe.
C2 9D is unused and should be rendered as blank space.

I doubt TPB knows how to add any these characters to a post, so it might be something screwed up in your processing of the posted text. Also, if you are using a varchar instead of a nvarchar, only Latin characters would be supported.

See http://utf8-chartable.de/unicode-utf8-table.pl for details on Unicode codes with UTF-8 encoding.

test

@Patrick, there's a major bug or bugs with posting comments to some threads.

I've notice that when I've clicked on certain threads with the "new comment" link, the thread shows no new comments and the page is at the top of the thread. For example, the Funny Picture thread.

I've also notice that all the comments are missing from the thread "Too soon for Texas & Harvey jokes?" if you go it via a link with the offset parameter like
https://patrick.net/post/1309403/?offset=28758#comment-1437445 but they are there if you go to the link without the offset parameter
https://patrick.net/post/1309403
This means that if you post to a thread, you don't see your comments or anyone else's.

Dan8267 says

I've notice that when I've clicked on certain threads with the "new comment" link, the thread shows no new comments and the page is at the top of the thread. For example, the Funny Picture thread.

Did you mean the "latest" comment link on a list of posts? That was broken until just now:

https://github.com/killelea/node.patrick.net/commit/8abd294ffdf7d8266f5016732882b4b88245cd39
Dan8267 says

This means that if you post to a thread, you don't see your comments or anyone else's.

Seems to work OK for me. I just posted this comment to a thread, and upon posting, I see it.

Patrick says

Did you mean the "latest" comment link on a list of posts?

yes

Patrick, it seems the Like:Dislike quotient is always one for one in the latest comments. It's too much of a coincidence that a comment has 2 likes and 2 dislikes, or 4 likes and 4 dislikes, etc.

Or maybe we have reached brainwash parity on PatNet?

If it actually worked in Chrome on an android phone, that would be an improvement.

Philistine says

Patrick, it seems the Like:Dislike quotient is always one for one in the latest comments

So, Patrick, did you fix this, or did it just fix itself? Everything back to normal now. Bizarre-o Land!

I did not change anything about like vs dislike lately.

@zzyzzx is the site still broken in Chrome on Android? If so, what happens? Just blank, hang, or something else?

This comment is being made with Firefox on Android.

Well, Firefox on Android seems OK.

This is a comment from Chrome on Android.

Dan8267 says

@Patrick, there's a major bug or bugs with posting comments to some threads.

I've notice that when I've clicked on certain threads with the "new comment" link, the thread shows no new comments and the page is at the top of the thread. For example, the Funny Picture thread.

This is because @Patrick replaced ban with ignore. There are all sorts of bugs with ignore including showing the "new comment" link for ignored users and then when you click on it, you don't see a new comment.

Ignore and ban should be independent features, but if you are going to marry the two, and I advise against that, then at least make the ignore go both ways, so that the person you ignore cannot see your posts. Also fix the new comment bug with ignore, as that's a very annoying bug that alone makes ignore not worth using. This could be done using a left join with your ignore table and checking for null in the where clause.

Still no problem. So I cannot reproduce it.

Dan8267 says

showing the "new comment" link for ignored users

Ah thanks, will fix that.

@patrick, I suggest setting up URL forwarding from old URLs to new site's URLs. Google search results yield error pages. That's not good for your ranking.

For example, https://patrick.net/Leftists+and+Social+Justice+Warriors+are+Conservatives 404: LeftistsandSocialJusticeWarriorsareConservatives was not found

@Patrick, the links to posts are frequently messed up. This includes the "first unread post" on the index page and the links to posts in the user's comments page.

Here is an example of one of the links from a user page that takes you to a page with no comments.
https://patrick.net/post/1310376/?offset=29093#comment-1444009
I do not know the cause of this bug, but a good place to start looking is at edge cases like the first or last comment on a page.

@Patrick, may have been suggested before. Have you ever thought about allowing a post to be saved prior to posting? Not comments, but originating a new post. Sometimes life happens and you're getting something good down and have to run off. I know you could always just create your posts in word or some other program and then copy and paste. So this may be a silly suggestion.

@Dan8267, noticed the same thing. You beat me to it.

@Patrick, another bug. Some HTTP requests for images are returning the text "content was not found". It's also returning a 404 status.

Thanks Dan, that /uploads/2011/12/excuse.jpg link refers to an image which is simply not on the server. I did not delete it. Kind of disturbing that it's gone.

Other images from that month are still there. I'll check my backups to see the last time I had excuse.jpg.

Dan8267 says

Here is an example of one of the links from a user page that takes you to a page with no comments.

OK, at least all the comment permalinks should work correctly now. So when you click on the date/time of any comment, even in a user's comment list or a search result, you should go to the right comment.

I want a live post/comment editing preview. I'm always frustrated editing the raw html every time I quote someone - it's hard to read with no indentation to help me decide what parts to remove. Being able to see it rendered as I type would at least help with that a bit. It's easy too:

<textarea id="textArea"></textarea>
<h3>Post Preview</h3>
<div id="preview" style="padding: 1em; border: 1px solid #aaa;"></div>
<script>
var textArea = document.querySelector('#textArea');
var preview = document.querySelector('#preview');
textArea.addEventListener('input', function updatePreview(){
preview.innerHTML = textArea.value;
});
</script>

On the same note, it would also be nice if the html presented to me when I quote someone was just plain easier to read. Use indentation and newlines to help. Eg

Formatting example: https://codepen.io/anon/pen/zEdRqr
Ideally, it would support adding a new additional level of indentation for each nested quote, like shown above. But, that's harder to code because you'd have to parse it and reassemble it with indentation. But, it should be very easy to make at least the top level a & blockquote tags be formated, and the content indented 1 level, and that would still help most use cases.

Thanks goat! This is a good idea.

I actually format text on the server side, so that's a complication. Maybe I should not do that, but let people compose entirely in the browser in wysiwyg mode, and then post to the server only when they save.

Anyone know a good wysiwyg editor I can use?

goat says

preview.innerHTML = textArea.value;

Hmmm, how can I exploit this to inject JavaScript?

Dan8267 says

goat says

preview.innerHTML = textArea.value;

Hmmm, how can I exploit this to inject JavaScript?

I guess it's not apparent from the post, but it's meant as a sample. I spoke with him recently about his html stripping strategy, and felt it was obvious that he should plug the same stripping code into this. Otherwise, the preview could be quite a bit different than what you see after you post.

Even if used as-is though, I think it'd be tough to exploit. Maybe if you can coerce someone into manually copy pasting code into the textbox.

Patrick, I agree and think a wysiwyg editor is the better direction to head in. My idea is just a monkey patch.

test

test2

OK, here's the problem, @Patrick.

In the old site you did a full postback when a user submitted a comment. As such, the user could always click the browser's back button to get back to the page state where his comment was in the text area control.

In the new site you are doing a partial postback with the request body containing key/value pairs separated with ampersands. Example:

comment_content=test2&comment_post_id=1302130

In the response body you are giving the HTML of the new or edited comment. I would give you an example of that, but I get an alert saying "database failed to accept some content".

I assume you have a JavaScript handler, perhaps using a third party library or framework, that inserts the returned HTML subtree into the DOM at the appropriate point and then clears the contents of the text area with the ID "ta". You do this without using the HTML 5 History API and thus the prior content of the text area is lost for good.

What you should do is use the pushState(stateObject, title, url) function to save the text of the text area "ta" so that if the user presses the back button the state is popped and the text area is restored.

Here's a JS Fiddle I threw together to demonstrate the concept.
1. Enter the following text in the text area: This is the index page.
2. Click on Page 1. Notice the text area goes blank.
3. Enter the text: This is page 1.
4. Click on Page 2. Notice the text area goes blank.
5. Enter the text: This is the second page.
4. Click on Page 3. Notice the text area goes blank.
5. Press the browser back button. Notice the text area now says, "This is the second page.".
6. Press the browser back button. Notice the text area now says, "This is page 1.".
7. Press the browser back button. Notice the text area now says, "This is the index page.".
8. Press the browser forward button. Notice the text area now says, "This is page 1.".
9. Press the browser forward button. Notice the text area now says, "This is the index page.".
10. Press the browser back button. Notice the text area now says, "This is page 1.".

No full postbacks. No loss of text history. 100% HTML 5 compliant.

@Dan8267

You're right that that was a problem. If there was an error accepting comment content (typically an apple emoticon which is in some character set the database does not understand) then the site would erase the content and going back would not recover it.

I did not know about pushState() and that looks quite useful, but I did something even simpler:

+ if (!response.err) document.getElementById('commentform').reset() // don't clear the textbox if error

So now your problem should never happen again, at least not the same way. Thanks for telling me about it, and a solution with code.

It would be nice if when someone posts a stock ticker like $shop that it would auto link it to yahoo finance. Might be even nicer if the $ prefix wasn't needed - download a db of all tickers.

Yes, that would not be hard. Thanks for the idea!

Get back to 'debt is slavery' and homes are overpriced. post the original rant about income vs. home price, and when it makes sense to rent.

your advice literally saved my life. it could save more

It's still available, in the footer, broken into 3 parts:

10 reasons it's a terrible time to buy
8 groups who lie about the housing market
37 bogus arguments about housing

But yes, hoping to make the site more about specific topics instead of continuous flame war, and housing should be one of the top 3.

Looking for people who want to be moderators for a given hashtag (topic). Moderators will have:

moderation power for comments and posts for their topic
ability to whilelist or blacklist users for their topics
ability to free comments in their topics from comment jail
ability to upload a css stylesheet to be used for their topic
a donation link (paypal, patreon, or bitcoin)

also thinking they should be able to appoint deputy moderators

It would be cool if I could take private notes on each user. Eg, add a new button or link near the user's profile picture area on each post/comment right next to the link to their profile, that when clicked, opens a popup / tooltip that has an editable text box. This way I can easily keep track of my interactions with people. It's hard for me to remember names, but I sometimes I wish I could note that a certain person was friendly, or a dbag, or that they helped me with a certain something.

Obviously, I could keep my notes in a text file, but it would be a nice touch to have it integrated into the UI for me.

Also, since people would probably not store any notes on most users, the button should indicate whether or not I have stored any notes on that person yet. That way as I read through the comments in a thread, it sticks out if I have notes on the author of a comment, and I can then just click the button to see the notes.

I guess you'd want to store data this server side, associated with their account.

Anonymous posts need to be civil if you want them to remain.

disable submit buttons onclick to prevent double submissions.

anon_04599 says

another test of an anonymous comment

Looks good to me. I do like that you made it a longer number. I don't want to be biased out of the gate with anonymous users . So if the number is longer and harder to remember I think that's good if you're looking for more users, even if they don't register. But if someone is being an ass, there's at least some identifier to know, especially if it's spam.

We'll find out tonight when the "oil" starts getting slick. Or they may legitimately be paid and have the weekends off. We'll see. We'll actually see if I'm here tonight. Got things to do.

patnet should support unicode characters like the rest of the modern web.

simply setting the following header on all textual pages will likely get you 99% of the way there:

content-type: text/html;charset=utf-8