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

Sorry, don't really know where to post this, but I've been seeing a lot of weird errors in the forum today.

"An error occurred. Please try again or contact your administrator" is returned when:

- parens are used in certain ways (it's hard to pin exactly what causes the error, but I've seen errors caused by open paren followed by closed paren, as well as parens surrounding multiple paragraphs)

- you post any kind of code (unless it doesn't have parens lol)

- you post any kind of link at all. Plain text URLs are fine - they will be converted to links after the post is submitted. But if you edit a post that has a link, you have to replace it with a plain text URL before submitting the edit

- you use the forum quote feature, bc it generates a link to the quoted post. text can be manually styled with the blockquote format, though

The weirdest thing is it doesn't seem to happen consistently on every thread. For example, I think this thread will be mostly fine (I've already made and deleted test threads.) (I can't use the quote feature in this thread tho)

But I think the following thread have the problems I described above:

[https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/f/discussion/389883/calling-srand-multiple-times]

[https://forums.garmin.com/apps-software/mobile-apps-web/f/garmin-connect-web/389792/measurement-units]

It's pretty easy to recreate - just reply with a link or edit an existing comment with a link, and the forum will return the same error as described above.

I'm not sure if the forum is applying some sort of "enhanced security" to certain threads?

EDIT: Also, I just tried to paste an image into this very post and I got the same error. Pasting an image in a reply also fails. Same with using an image URL.

So it seems that the problem with images is more widespread than the problems with links and parens.

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flocsy🤠 10 months ago in reply to flowstate

Technically you are correct, but all that doesn't matter. We only need 1 general topic for all these though, 'cause as long as only veterans of the forum are able to know/remember (and even that not always) how to post in the forum we could just say the forum still doesn't work.

flowstate 10 months ago in reply to flocsy🤠

Well, why bother posting any of these topics at all, with nearly zero expectation that any of the bugs will be fixed?

This subforum just gives us an "official" place to vent.

I still think it's better for us to understand the nature of forum problems and to not confuse one issue with another, especially if workarounds exist, and in the off chance that any of the problems could actually be fixed (not likely).

For example, if an image can't be inserted in a normal post or any comment, then I know that it's probably because it's too big, and the solution is to resize. Sometimes pasting an image will fail, but inserting the same image using a 3rd party image hoster will work (even without resizing). Perhaps most importantly, this problem doesn't happen consistently, it only happens for some images.

When an image can't be inserted in the OP of a topic in the bug report forum, then it's a consistent and expected problem, and there's no workaround except posting the image in a comment, or posting a link to a hosted image.

flowstate 10 months ago in reply to flowstate

As a counterpoint, if these were "real" bug reports, I don't think it would be helpful to make generic posts like:

- posting links doesn't work

- posting images doesn't work

- posting code doesn't work

or even better

- posting doesn't work

Yeah, from the average end user's POV, that's all they care about, but we are devs and we would approach our own work a bit more analytically.

flowstate 10 months ago

Found another example of a comment which fails to be submitted if a link is included in it at the time of submission.

https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/f/discussion/406988/how-to-fetch-information-about-sleeping-schedule/1913680#1913680

Notes:

- by "link" I mean a literal clickable link (<a> element), not a plain text URL

- how does that comment now include a link you ask? because I pasted in a url as plain text, and purposely de-linkified it using CTRL/CMD-K after the forum auto-linkified it. At the time of submission, the url was present as plain text, not a link. The link was only created after the comment was submitted.

- why is this a problem? because sometimes users manually create links with CTRL/CMD-K, when they want the link text to be different from the link URL. More often, users will just paste in a plain text url, and the *forum* will automatically create a link *before* the post/comment is submitted (e.g. it happens when you press space after typing/pasting a plain text url)

Recreation procedure:

1) go ahead and edit that comment. without making any changes at all, try to submit it. you will see that it fails with our favourite forum error

2a) now use CTRL/CMD-K to copy the url and remove the link. (the url needs to be copied bc the link text is an abbrievated form of the url). replace the resulting plain text abbreviated url with the full url. if the forum tries to auto-linkify it, use CTRL/CMD-K to change it back to plain text. submit the comment and you will see that it's successful. (and again, the url will be auto-linkified after the fact)

2b) or just delete the link (after making a copy of the original url) and see that the edited comment can be submitted just fine. please put the url back afterwards (you will have to de-linkify it as described above)