h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

At the top of MP150533 I now see

"Postings by HappyÐude® ... "short skirt long jacket" (have you seen my coxcomb?)...a ℘eripatetical entity"

rather than the more usual

"Postings by HappyÐude® ... "short skirt long jacket" (have you seen my coxcomb?)...a þeripatetical entity"

Blimey! Sorry about that. No idea, but it is most probably to do with the tech upgrade which occurred this morning - we'll forward this to the tech team.

Hopefully we'll get that sorted soon! (Unless it's an unexpected new feature, of course...)

I'm having difficulty editing large guide entries, too. The parser puts junk like that into random places. Sometimes it won't preview or update entry at all, sometimes it returns with all the junk marked in red.

(Maybe it's a compiler rather than a parser, but that's where it happens)

Hello all,

The techies have nearly completed a fix for the nickname issue, but it probably won't go live til tomorrow.

However (Icy!), to fix the Entry problem, we'll have to get them to replicate the situation in-house. Could you tell us what it is you were trying to edit and what happened?

Thanks very much!

h2g2 Editors

Don't know what Icy did, but I had a similar problem when doing some editing two weeks ago. I thought it was a problem of firefox - but then maybe it is, who knows.

I copied the originals, edited them, then copied them back into an email. They were fine - in preview. I didn't realise that on updating the entry some very odd characters showed up in the final version.

Hi Eds,

The problem I had today was with editing A46972182 (which is quite large)

If I edit it now, then press Preview or Update Entry (I'm in Alabaster) it immediately returns, blank. If I persist and hit the preview or update button 3 or 4 times, then the edit fails and the previewed version shows groups of strange characters appearing at seemingly random points.

Hope this helps explain. I'll try it again tomorrow to see if you've fixed it through the other change.

Icy

That doesn't happen in brunel.

Yes it does - I just checked

In fact it's worse, as I have to endure the Brunel skin while I'm doing it.

I've been editing, too today (admittedly not such a large text), and it worked fine. Maybe a browser issue in that case?

The only thing that has changed since I last successfully performed this edit is the technical changes, so I'd be inclined to start there.

The file size may be a factor - the strange characters don't start until a long way down the file.

Does anyone else have a big piece of Guide-ML they can edit?

I have a long text which isn't yet in guide ml. Do you think it's the link causing the trouble?

This is hwat it looks like, btw:

<LINK HREF="http://www. rïДù!1}F WÈvq”ù

Yes, that's exactly what I see!

Eds, take note - it looks like a length issue.

Your guide ml looks unusual to me, maybe it's that?

No, it's the same error that you're getting, and these random groups of letters can occur anywhere, not just in the middle of links.

Let's hope I'll not have this trouble when uploading the Post articles tomorrow night.

Another problem here: I can't manage to update the Smudger archive at A1134848. It's another lengthy entry so it might be that length issue again. Similar effects to those already noted - nothing shown when I hit preview, then "error in ML" messages and odd characters appearing. This happens even when I preview before making any changes!

And some more problems:

F48000?thread=6415510

...but the good news is that the problem with the display of my user name has now been fixed...

I just tried to change the Post account's preferences back to the ones our travelling Editor prefers, but nothing happens*.

*That's not a problem for me, as the settings are currently in my preferred skin, but I'd feel very bad if they can't be changed back to Rich's preferred skin.