I noticed [in a recent Thread] the OP opened with [a quote from a linked article]. Because the quote was altered [slightly] the OP made use of [brackets] to indicate the altered parts of the quote. One thing I noticed [that I had never noticed before] was that all the text within the brackets [was not visible in the scroll-over preview from the forum page].
I am opening this Thread [in ATMB] just as a test to see if this can be used as an intentional technique. [Could be useful in Cafe Society to avoid Spoilers in the scroll-over or it could have other uses that I am not thinking of at the moment.]
Out of curiosity, has anyone else ever noticed this before?
And I just went back the the ATMB page and did a scroll-over of the title for this Thread. Indeed, it works. All the text withing the brackets is not viewable in the scroll-over.
Yeah, the spoiler issue in Cafe Society is the only practical use I can think of- if an OP contains a spoiler, the spoiler will be visible upon scroll-over even if the poster made use of a spoiler box. People have complained about this before, it’s why some posters when writing a Cafe Society OP will Enter several empty lines before posting any spoilers so as to get down below the scroll-over area.
Bracketing the spoiler would avoid the need for all the extra blank space.
Not that I think the teeming millions are desperately clamoring for such usage, but some posters may make good use of it.
Possible someone else could think of other practical uses.
Could well be used for humor/punking.
OP that reads:
“I gave my girlfriend [the gift of a night on the town. We had theater tickets and went to her favorite seafood restaurant where we each ordered] crabs, [all in all a wonderful plan] for Valentines Day”
In scroll-over would read:
“I gave my girlfriend crabs, for Valentines Day”
Geez, I thought everybody knew that. It’s an artifact of the way vBulletin deals with BB codes. BB codes (which appear within square brackets) are not processed in the preview scroll-over. The scroll-over is done with an html attribute title=“text of the scroll-over” which actually makes it just a big tool-tip.
[noparse]If you have [AnyOldBBCode]stuff stuff stuff[/AnyOldBBCode] the scroll-over text will simply omit the BB code (that is, the square brackets and anything in between the [ and the ], but it still displays the “stuff stuff stuff” part as if the BB code wasn’t there at all.
Thus, anything you put in xxxxx tags won’t be bold, anything in
tags won’t look like a quote, anything in xxxxx tags will be shown and not look like a spoiler.
The parser apparently doesn’t look at the actual text between the [ and the ] to see if it’s a valid BB code. It just omits it all, no matter what it is.
[/noparse]
(I thought everybody knew that. )
Thanks, Senegoid!
Yeah, I had deduced the reason behind it. I just never noticed this quirky side-effect before, and wasn’t sure if anyone else had ever noticed it.
Hmmmm, so I guess I can’t go forward with my plan to name the practice “bienville-tagging”.
I don’t know how many people would actually put the thought into doing it, but the fully effective way of having the spoiler hidden in both the scroll-over and the post itself when viewed would be to use spoiler tags as usual but then also bracket the text that appears withing the spoiler tags.
[ SPOILER ] [“Rosebud” was a deli in Brooklyn Heights.] [ /SPOILER ]
Don’t know how many people would remember to do it, and I’m not sure the problem that it solves is so very rampant. I was just throwing it out as the one possible practical application I could think of.
)