[META] Forum returning lots of errors today (e.g. parens, links and images cause problems)

Always waiting for a fix

I've been talking with IT about this one, and they've been working with the forum vendor to resolve it. As some have suggested, it appears to be a CloudFlare issue—I don't have any details beyond that, but it is being worked.

The forum is still rejecting posts that contain certain usages of parens and certain types of code. 

In my case, when I get these errors, I usually end up replacing parens with square brackets and/or replacing entire code blocks with screenshots.

It’s pretty frustrating, and others having been sporadically reporting this type of thing. Just look at some of the recent posts in the discussion forum or bug report forum where ppl say stuff like “I tried to insert code but the forum wouldn’t let me — huh, weird!”

Ofc the vast majority of posts don’t contain any code (especially outside of the CIQ subforums), so most ppl probably aren’t affected. I think short posts (the majority of posts) are also more likely to be unaffected. It’s still the case that sometimes you can get around this problem by splitting up a longer post into a couple of shorter posts.

I’m kind of curious whether these errors are logged or not (in such a way that ppl from Garmin can see them and use them to track down the problem)?

FlowState said:

I’m kind of curious whether these errors are logged or not (in such a way that ppl from Garmin can see them and use them to track down the problem)?

LOL

flocsy🤠 said:

FlowState said:

I’m kind of curious whether these errors are logged or not (in such a way that ppl from Garmin can see them and use them to track down the problem)?

LOL

I’m glad you picked up on the absurd implication in that statement (that the forum experience is important enough that this kind of problem would be fixed if nobody — or relatively few people — complain).

But seriously: it’s annoying that the forum has the ability to reject our posts for seemingly arbitrary reasons, but there seems to be no way to fix the problem once and for all. My point is there’s no way I’m going to collect samples of every type of post that was rejected, or try to figure out exactly *why* these posts were rejected (other than to note that it’s always some combo of parens, code, formatting, images or length), so it would be really great if these errors *were* logged so the problematic posts could be noted and the root causes could be addressed, without constant nagging from a tiny portion of the userbase.

But like I said, I see the absurdity there. Since the “general public” (99.99% of active forum posters) is apparently happy now, nothing is gonna get fixed on its own.

fantastic! I wanted to respond, but now I can't post either...

OK I found it, it was the parentheses...

yay

I don't work in Garmin, but I can extrapolate an answer based on how things go in companies I worked in plus experience here as a user - just like you ...

1. the forum doesn't generate revenue, just takes resources (money + time)

2. they have no idea how to configure CloudFlare

3. they have no idea where to look for the logs

4. they have no time to look at the logs, besides if they look they'll see the 1st 3 examples, all of which are legitimately blocked, because they are real spam, and they won't notice your post attempt

5. even if they found it they don't know how to fix it

6. if they attempted to fix it it'll break other things

and the list goes on...