Yeah no problem!

trudelta said:

  But there are many other places in the text where there are numbers and it doesn't choke on them.  Weird.

That's why I think this is very similar to problems we have seen in the forums both years ago on the old platform and more recently (starting last year) on the current platform.

- In both forum cases, *some* uses of parens ( ) would fail, but others wouldn't

- At least in the old platform, *some* uses of digits would fail, but others wouldn't

- As another example, typing "alert()" (or some similar built-in javascript function name followed by parens) - was not allowed in the old forums.

In all 3 cases (2 forum platforms and CIQ store), it's either assumed or explicitly stated that the root cause is some kind of anti-spam or anti-code injection protection. I think the issue is that this protection is a bit overzealous about what it considers to be a malicious code injection attack. (Ofc from a security pov, better to be overzealous than lax.)

I also think it's too bad that Garmin apparently cannot simply solve the code injection problem by properly sanitizing data that's posted in the forums or submitted to the store, but instead has to resort to service(s) that try block "bad data patterns" instead. Imo, blocking "bad data" is a workaround/hack which basically admits you are unable to transmit and receive arbitrary text without the risk of some kind of injection attack. (Yeah, we all know about the ransomware attack.)

To be fair, security isn't simple. (And I realize a large part of the problem is not just transmitting and receiving potentially dangerous text, but the fact that the text will be displayed by a browser or app running on a user's device.)

flocsy🤠 said:

Can you notify IT so they can try to configure CloudFront for the dashboard, so it khmmmm..... allows using numbers ? I know it's not that simple, because numbers can be used in many other apps. It's just the symptom.

As you mentioned it's not that simple.

For example, I can only reproduce the problem when I use the OP's English app text for both Description and What's New. If I use their What's New but have some short or random text of my own for Description, the problem isn't triggered.

Similarly, sometimes cloudflare blocks longer forum posts that have things it doesn't seem to like (such as parens, formatting and links) but if you split the exact same text into multiple posts, it works fine.

I'm guessing there are complex rules/heuristics involved which appear to be "random" to us (but are probably quite deterministic in the sense that a given input with contents A will *always* trigger the "bad post" system while a different input with contents B will *always* be accepted, for any given configuration of the system.)

If there was a simple "pls don't be dumb" toggle in the cloudflare config, Garmin would've presumably turned it on by now.

flocsy🤠 said:

But since it looks like it was fixed for the forum, they might know how to fix it for the dashboard.

I would tend to agree with this, which is what I wanted to imply with the forum connection. (At the very least, they *know* that the cloudfront protection caused/causes problems in the forums, and it seems that similar protection from cloudflare is also used for the ciq store.)

But on the flip side, the forum is *still* broken anyway. (Just less broken than before.)

Yeah, this is so weird, that I could almost say it's interesting or challenging,Ike a cypher we need to crack. I would guess that some AI is involved, that can explain why seemingly unrelated small changes can change the outcome.

HOWEVER I am not in the mood for cyphers and honestly I don't think anyone here is, or in other words who gives a sh... Garmin IT should either learn how to configure their new toy or throw it. I don't care what technology is used as long as it works. And actually I don't care either when it doesn't work. Just fix it. This is ridiculous no matter how we look at it. We're in 2025 and a company worth billions can't have a functioning forum and a dashboard for the slaves who work for them for free.

I'll report this specific case to the store team. I agree this one is pretty weird.