This comment looks fine in the thread but is messing up "My Comments"

October 26, 2006 1:18 PM

This comment looks fine in the thread but is messing up "My Comments". Everything after it is in tiny-font.
posted by GuyZero to Bugs at 1:18 PM (10 comments total)

I have been filing bug reports all day at work, so I'm on a roll here.
posted by GuyZero at 1:18 PM on October 26, 2006

I think I fixed it, but it may be the problem with long comments that have a small tag before the 800 character mark for the "my comments" cut off and not closing it afterwards.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 1:42 PM on October 26, 2006

I think this is fixed now.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 1:44 PM on October 26, 2006

Perhaps there could be a central listing (linked in the FAQ?) of known 'bugs'.

Examples:
- the "pre" issue that messes up line breaks
- mycomments page breaking due to unclosed tags in a comment

I can't think of the rest now, but there are a handful that come up over and over again.
posted by raedyn at 1:59 PM on October 26, 2006

actually the mycomments thing isn't because of unclosed tags, it's because the mycomments page cuts off comments at 800 words/characters/something. So if the cutoff is between a start tag and the end tag, this will happen. Still a bug, just wanted to point out that it's not the poster's fault.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 2:06 PM on October 26, 2006

it's 4000 characters where the cutoff takes place, and sometimes that is in the middle of a big block of styled text.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 2:09 PM on October 26, 2006

I know it's not the poster's fault. But the fact that the mycomments page cuts off a comment at 4000 characters, means that on the my comments page some comments have unclosed tags.
posted by raedyn at 2:35 PM on October 26, 2006

can someone point me to the reasoning behind the char limit on my comments? or lay it out here again? are posts limited similarly?
posted by carsonb at 3:50 PM on October 26, 2006

yeah, due to the nature of the gnarly query to pull comments from a variety of tables, the only way it could work was to do this thing where open-ended field types aren't allowed. So instead of the comment field being referenced by what it is, which is an endless blob of text, it had to have a limit of 8000 chars max. I had it set there, but the page is a mile long when you allow that much text and slowed down the query, so 4000 seemed to cover most comments that were less than 4-5 paragraphs and didn't look too bad.

I need to test out running the tag balancer code I run on comments, which could automatically close stuff left open.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 4:25 PM on October 26, 2006

can someone point me to the reasoning behind the char limit on my comments?

Sometimes people make really, really long comments, either as legitimate communications or as silliness/grief.
posted by cortex at 4:48 PM on October 26, 2006