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Tech interlude: quote and reply bug

A few people are finding that when they use the Quote and Reply link in comments the quoted text ends up stripped of spaces so that it all runs on and on and on and on.

I’m going through and editing these as I find them, but if it’s happened to you could you briefly at least let me know your OS and browser so I can look for the cause?


28 thoughts on Tech interlude: quote and reply bug

  1. WinXP & Firefox (running Adblock Plus 1.3.10 & Disconnect 1.0.1). All updates/patches installed.

  2. Hm. Doesn’t look like it’s as simple as just one browser incompatibility then.

    There may possibly be an intermittent conflict between the Quote Comment plugin and the caching plugin, but right now we really need the caching plugin.

  3. Nahida:
    …Ohlook,Ithinkithappenedtome.o.O

    MacOSX…andChrome.xD

    Fascinating… Windows 7 and Chrome. You can see that it’s quoting wrong before you post.

    1. Ah, I hadn’t realised that you could see it was quoting wrong before you post.

      Could I ask that folks fix the spaces for themselves then, in that case? Rather than (a) breaking the comments box with the long line of alphabet salad and (b) assuming mods will fix it up?

      If you don’t want to/are unable to fix the spaces, you could just leave the line that links back to the comment you’re replying to, and maybe add a paraphrase [in square brackets] in place of the quote.

  4. I’ve had it happen on both Windows 7 and Mac OSX, both with Firefox. I’ve kept the quotes short so I can fix the spaces without going cross-eyed. 😉

    1. @matlun, I haven’t fixed it, but I think that’s because it’s intermittent. It seems like the quote function only goes snafu when the caches are at a particular point in the refresh cycle.

  5. Just tried to quote in these comments and saw it too — Debian 6, Iceweasel 3.5.16 (which is basically Firefox 3.5.16). So Linux is not immune either.

  6. Whoa.  Doom!  Firefox 3.6.23, on Windows 7 32-bit.

    Looks like someone was trying to fix the “strip spaces after sentences” issue in quotes, and went way way overboard.  oO

  7. It happened to me twice, yesterday. Firefox 3.6.23 on Ubuntu 10.10 . First time I manually inserted spaces in the quoted text; second time I got smart and just copied the original text and pasted it over the quoted version. Worked very well.

  8. tigtog:
    @matlun,Ihaven’tfixedit,butIthinkthat’sbecauseit’sintermittent.Itseemslikethequotefunctiononlygoessnafuwhenthecachesareataparticularpointintherefreshcycle.

    Indeed 😉

    Linux (Ubuntu) and Firefox here.

  9. It seems to work on this computer, though. Still Firefox, but now Vista. I have no idea if this is because of temporary effects, or due to the OS.

  10. Thanks for all the feedback folks. Because of other things happening in life right now I haven’t had time to dig down into code and really find what’s happening, but after this weekend I should be able to.

    Brandy, thanks for tracking down that one.

  11. I think I have figured out why it sometimes worked for me and sometimes not.

    If I select some text and then press “Quote this comment”, it works as expected (quotes the selected text). But if I do not select any text (to quote the full comment), then it runs together.

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