Tags with stars in thars

December 17, 2007 9:32 AM

While reading through this FPP, I noticed that ericbop had tagged it "*$," and decided to click on the tag to see what other posts shared that tag. It didn't so much work. A little URL manipulation showed that $ works fine, but anything with a * in it seems to break.
posted by cerebus19 to Bugs at 9:32 AM (14 comments total)

The "It didn't so much work" link should be this.
posted by cerebus19 at 9:36 AM on December 17, 2007

I think it trips up Apache's built-in anti cross site scripting stuff. A lot of tags with weird stuff in them (degree symbols, non-english characters) seem to cause the same error.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:36 AM on December 17, 2007

That FPP really sucked, too.
posted by BeerFilter at 9:38 AM on December 17, 2007

Would it be possible/easy to prevent users from creating those tags in the first place? It seems less than useful to allow tags to be created that are guaranteed not work.
posted by cerebus19 at 9:39 AM on December 17, 2007

"...guaranteed not to work," that is.
posted by cerebus19 at 9:39 AM on December 17, 2007

Yeah, we'll do more filtering on the tag input field to fix this.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:49 AM on December 17, 2007

What's the "*$" tag supposed to mean in that context, anyhow?
posted by Plutor at 10:39 AM on December 17, 2007 [1 favorite]

oh, I just got it Plutor, it's star + buck
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:41 AM on December 17, 2007 [1 favorite]

it's star + buck

Jesus fuck that's almost as stupid as the post itself.
posted by dersins at 10:53 AM on December 17, 2007 [3 favorites]

GROOOOOAN
posted by Plutor at 11:05 AM on December 17, 2007

Also you can tag stuff .htaccess but you can't read that tag page.
posted by Mitheral at 11:24 AM on December 17, 2007

Beedee beedee beedee -- hello, $.
posted by davejay at 1:49 PM on December 17, 2007 [1 favorite]

And here I'd assumed it was the wildcard symbol with a dollar sign after. Because, you know, the previous guy coulda spent an arbitrary amount on coffee? Never mind.
posted by nebulawindphone at 7:34 AM on December 18, 2007

Kurt Vonnegut permanently changed the meaning of the asterisk for me.
posted by cmyk at 9:56 AM on December 18, 2007