WHAT causes a posting to look like THIS?

[salinqmind]

On another board, answers posted in response to a story (I think it's run by Wordpress) show up in a normal fashion.

Then there are answers posted that show up as this:

A
l
l
t
h
e
w
o
rd
s
sh
o
w
o
n
e
l
ett
e
r
a
t
a
t
i
m
e.

It's sort of interesting, like a puzzle or word-find game, but it takes too long! I've asked them and got no response at all. Is it me, or should they be doing something to fix it?

[ThisSpaceForRent]

Abuse/misuse of the "enter" key?

[salinqmind]

It's not the fault of the website, some glitch in their system?

You mean when someone posts a response it is the poster's doing, their computer, that makes it come out like that? How? Why?

[ZenBeam]

It sounds like only some of the answers are vertical. Maybe some are typed directly into the reply box, and others are typed elsewhere, then pasted into the reply box.

That would make a difference because... ummm... well, I have no clue.

[salinqmind]

Ah! Well, that's a better answer than I've gotten so far. I've never seen such a thing anywhere else. It's very annoying to try to read especially if there are multiple strings of single letters. It can take forever just to scroll down to the bottom of the page. Thx.

[The Tao's Revenge]

Try cutting and pasting a vertical post into notepad, and see if it disappears. If for some odd reason the width of the element the text is in was zero or clost to it, that'd cause that.

[voltaire]

What browser are you using? Try another browser and see if it changes.

[BigT]

Is there any other difference between the answers? Like, for example, do the vertical answers have an avatar, while the others don't? Because this sounds like an error in the CSS.

[Saltire]

Are the posters from other countries? Is it possible that this comes from an Asian language that reads top-to-bottom?

Total shot in the dark, by the way. I have no idea why text might start out in Chinese characters and appear as Roman.

[Digital is the new Analog]

I've had web pages render incorrectly like that..sometimes hitting F5 to refresh makes it better. If that works for you, then it's the server or SW doing it, not the user. Otherwise..well..one of those answers up there might be right.


-D/a

[buckgully]

Could be that a div that wraps around the text is being squished into a tall narrow shape by something else on the page. That could be caused by them using a poorly written theme or they might have made changes to their web pages, to insert custom ads for example, that isn't working quite properly with their layout.

If you select the text and copy it into a text editor like Notepad or TextEdit, does it still have the weird spacing or does it look normal?

[Dr. Strangelove]

Originally Posted by buckgully

Could be that a div that wraps around the text is being squished into a tall narrow shape by something else on the page. That could be caused by them using a poorly written theme or they might have made changes to their web pages, to insert custom ads for example, that isn't working quite properly with their layout.

I've seen this happen quite often on systems with nested posting. Very deeply nested posts end up pressing against the right margin and can end up with a few letters per line. Top-level posts don't have this problem.

[ftg]

Getting into serious wild guessing here: It could be due to a messed up character encoding somewhere along the line + software that does its own creative stuff.

E.g., UTF-16 or some such 2+ byte encoding. The software can only handle 1 byte characters. The extra byte is interpreted as a ~null which is end-of-string in some systems which then gets warped into a newline.

Or something like that. (Hey, I'm just tossing out an idea. No flames please.)

Botched html headers with the wrong character set listed can start things rolling downhill.