Unclosed quote tags may cause blank posts

Since the move to the new server, a bug has appeared where an unclosed quote tag sometimes causes blank posts. (Here’s an example.) So, if your post displays as blank (I’ll illustrate this in the next post), check your quote tags. If you miss the five minute edit window, you can either repost the message with fixed tags or report the post and have a mod fix the tags. The latter is preferred, as it prevents a slew of “why was that post blank?” follow-up posts, but in a fast-moving thread the former is understandable.

[QUOTE=Giraffe]
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If you click reply on that previous post, you’ll see it’s actually quite long. In fact, unclosed quote tags seem to only trigger the problem when followed by a fair amount of text. If I posted the same exact message with the last few paragraphs cut out, it would display as expected with the mangled tags in the text.

That’s interesting to know. So, at least one of the gremlins has been found – good. Thanks, Giraffe.

Wasn’t there a bug in an early version of vBulletin (or this board in particular), that caused a non-closed tag to carry over into subsequent posts?

I remember a bug in an old version of vBulletin where I would type in a long, intelligent, well-reasoned post, and after I hit submit, what appeared in the thread was a load of stupid tripe that caused everyone to point at me and laugh.

I can’t believe they still haven’t fixed that after all this time.

:wink:

I’m surprised with the new edit feature (and the always available “preview” feature) that postings with unclosed quote tags are occurring.

I guess some people just don’t want to take take the extra time for such things.

I think it was Bertrand Russell who said

[QUOTE]

Clever how you bundled up all your posts from the last week or so to use as the testing/demonstration text.

Ignore me for the moment… I just want to test something here.

[quote=Mangetout]

[QUOTE=Giraffe]

[QUOTE=Giraffe]

Why can’t I get it to work (that is, to go wrong) with short posts?

[QUOTE=Giraffe]

It only seems to work with very long quotes, but that wasn’t what I was trying to test.

The non-appearing text is still indexed for searching. Interesting.

Looks better than a spoiler box.