Forum Thread

I noticed that sometimes, when I comment "<3" instead of showing the heart, a small line of what I assume is coding shows up and it says something about the comment and the time posted. This never bothered me, since it almost always fixed itself later if I just went back to the feed.

However, I just posted a "</3" on Ilima's feed auctioning some art they did, and the whole back half of the comment disappeared. The broken heart and anything after it was gone. I made a test feed (still on my profile) and took screenshots of this happening.

Testing if <3 would break it like it sometimes does

No dice. It worked normally. Maybe it was just a weird incident, then.

Testing if [broken heart] would break it like it just had

Oh, it did break with this one. Let's do it again with more documenting of the process and to see if it's still just a coincidence or rare thing.

Testing it again, but this time screenshotting the feed before I post it


Result of the last test

It still broke.. Weird.


UPDATE AS I WAS MAKING THIS THREAD:
It would appear that the broken heart also messes with some of the [] [/] coding, as seen in these screenshots:
As you can see here, my coding should be fine (unless I'm blind and missing it- this is completely possible)

However, when I previewed it, after the broken heart got all messed up


To resolve the issue for posting purposes, I removed the I was planning to use.

ANOTHER MID-POST WRITING EDIT: Even removing the coding didn't fix it.



I'm not sure why this is happening, since I feel like people have posted the broken heart before. I'm sure I have.

I have to go to work for about 7 hours, but if others could continue testing this for me and contributing their finds to the thread, I would really appreciate it. I know a few others have posted broken hearts on my feed because I'd asked, and I testing one in the PalPad and it didn't do anything unusual.

I don't know if this will help, but I am currently using a laptop. I don't know if anything different might happen for mobile.

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There are two functions that execute when you submit a comment: add_comment.php and show_comments.php.

add_comment.php is bugged, it (most likely) does the following:
The problem here is that TEXT is returned and not ENCODED. The fact that you used </ in your text is why it broke, without encoding everything you type is seen as code and </ is invalid code so it crashed (or something?) after that.

It works again after you reload because then show_comments.php is called:
Here you only have the encoded text which is always seen as text, so it's impossible to break the rest of the code.

Knowing this, I think there are two ways this can break:
#1: Bad connection; add_comment.php works but for some reason show_comments.php didn't come through. I was able to recreate this by blocking show_comments.php altogether, simulating a slow connection did only delay the correct text, so for connection to be the cause it would have to be a really unstable connection I guess.

#2: Breaking code after "invalid code"; at the end of the response of add_comment.php there's a little script with showComments('2018- etc. (as seen in your images too). This script usually executes show_comments.php which then shows the correct text. According to your images this script is somehow changed into text, most likely due to the invalid code. I however was not able to recreate this but I still think this is what you had.