See any malformed imported posts?

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We’re close to 1,000,000 posts. Although we have hundreds of thousands more to come, I’d like to start getting the ones we have cleaned up. Some of th
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#477369 (Top story posted by Tracey)

Windows 11 Pro version 22H2 build 22621.2359 + Microsoft 365 + Edge

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woody

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Type this into the Askwoody search: font=
Multiple hits 537 pages of posts

Typing any HTML code will produce multiple hits.

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created IT- AE

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woody, Norio

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Type this into the Askwoody search: font=
Multiple hits 537 pages of posts

Typing any HTML code will produce multiple hits.

I used [/FONT] which gives pretty much the same results as Da Boss’s.  For example, here’s a messy one: https://www.askwoody.com/forums/topic/possible-vlookup-formula/.

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woody

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I think most of those, at least, have been fixed. Can you find any stragglers?

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All 329 topics started by @WSTraceyCapen still appear to be badly formatted. But his links to Windows Secrets newsletters don’t work anyway, so perhaps it doesn’t matter.

I think ALL most imported links are still broken.

(e.g. check @WSSusanBradley‘s replies, such as #1238698 and hover over her five links there.)

Windows 11 Pro version 22H2 build 22621.2359 + Microsoft 365 + Edge

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Looking at my own imports that have gone awry, between and the first new line entry, the font is super tiny, then returns to normal size unless it hits another , where it repeats that output behavior.  The HTML is still there (they end with ) but the post is legible.  The size tags (that were also in all of them) don’t show up at all in those that I’ve checked.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

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woody

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I hope I’m not going OT here, but as more of my WS posts become visible here, one thing I’ve noticed is that, where I’ve provided a link, the link’s target is appended to the URL of the page the post is on; so you get to an error page. If that’s unclear, look at this one:

post 1500635

The workaround, of course, is to modify the URL in the address bar while you’re at the error page.

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woody

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tonyl wrote:

I hope I’m not going OT here, but as more of my WS posts become visible here, one thing I’ve noticed is that, where I’ve provided a link, the link’s target is appended to the URL of the page the post is on; so you get to an error page.

Great point. I hadn’t noticed before, but all the many links I had posted there over the last seven years now appear as you describe under my profile here. I hope this can be fixed or it makes this mighty import effort far less useful.

Windows 11 Pro version 22H2 build 22621.2359 + Microsoft 365 + Edge

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Not OT at all.

I’ll get this to the devs. Thanks!

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tonyl

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As of this morning, I believe those have been fixed. Please double-check and point me to any remaining problems.

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Elly

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Some links which were bad due to a local prefix are now no longer links at all, but others are still bad in the same way as they haven’t been touched.

Windows 11 Pro version 22H2 build 22621.2359 + Microsoft 365 + Edge

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Going through some of my older imported posts, I found this reply, “January 14, 2010 at 7:28 am in reply to: Just Installed And I Get This:” is duplicated exactly in all these posts:

#1200618, #1199862, #1204004, #1199188, #1203112, #1198310, #1202308, #1201495.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We were all once "Average Users". We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems, we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

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I’m beginning to think the copy of the WSL database we’re working with is corrupt.

Thanks for the warning. Let’s see if the devs can track it down.

I just sent this to the devs:In this topic:

https://www.askwoody.com/forums/topic/just-installed-and-i-get-this/

All of these posts are the same.

#1200618, #1199862, #1204004, #1199188, #1203112, #1198310, #1202308, #1201495

And all of these posts are the same

#1204001, #1199181, #1201492, #1202305,#1203109,#1198308,#1200615,
#1199859

And all of these posts are the same:

#1200897, #1198868, #1200151, #1203490, #1197954, #1202568, #1201823, #1198557

These are all repeated eight times:
#1202176, #1203970, #1203990, #1198342, #1198393, #1200640, and many more

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Turns out it WAS a corrupt database. From the devs at Fantasktic:

Those records actually appear duplicated in the source database . Appears this is how it was on the old site.

 

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Elly

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Here’s another one (sorry, Woody).

On WS, where I’ve included a keyboard combination e.g., Win+R, Shift+Right Click and so on, I’ve usually wrapped the combo in angled brackets, and the combination has disappeared when shown here. See #1512430. (I was giving someone the Alt codes for some musical notes.)

Occasionally I’ve used normal or square brackets and it was OK, see #1571841.

The same thing has happened when typing the path to a file with a placeholder, as in

C:\Users\Username

I normally put “Username” in angled brackets, to indicate it’s a placeholder. So the angled brackets seem to be the common factor, but I’ve just tried it in the test forum and it doesn’t happen.

 

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woody

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Unfortunately, I can’t fix that one. From the devs:

The problem is WordPress handles < and > as html tags and filters the content. If they were encoded in the source database there would be no problem but we can’t encrypt now without affecting other contents. This is unfortunately a limitation of the migration but fortunately searching the database there only ~ 150 replies that present this problem.

If you feel like pursuing the 150 replies, I’d be happy to set up a small group of people tasked with reviewing and manually updating those posts. Can’t imagine it would take too long, actually.

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tonyl

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TBH I don’t think any lives will be lost over it, and the devs’ keyboards are probably still smoking at the moment anyway.. I’ll have a quick look through them and maybe pick out any important ones and let you know. How’s that? might take a while, mind…

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I have an offer from Paul T to round ’em up. Want to work with him?

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OK, sounds good!

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Tony, how are you finding those aberrant posts?

cheers, Paul

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Hi Paul, it was the middle of the night here when you posted that; I’ll get cracking soon. Am I just meant to make a list? I’ll also check for any broken links and list them separately.

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A list of links is probably easiest to use.

cheers, Paul

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Oh crumbs. I’ve done 27 pages so far, but I haven’t made them clickable. Just the post numbers.

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Right, here’s a list. Seems there weren’t as many as I thought; like everyone else, I lost a whole lot in the recent debacle at WS. I think I got them all, they’re easy to miss.

There’s also a list of broken links that I found in the search.

 

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Tony, thanks for the lists.

Unfortunately, because the software filters content inside angle brackets, I can’t work out what is meant to be shown. This probably means we have a lot more than the 9 posts you found because you can’t search for things that don’t exist.

The only real way to work out what posts are broken would be to scan the old WSL posts for angle brackets and then relate them to the Woody’s posts.

cheers, Paul

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Lemme get the devs working on this.

The list of posts with angle brackets should be easy enough to produce – but an enormous job to fix.

The list of broken URLs may well be possible to fix programmatically. I’ll see.

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tonyl

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It is not exactly what are you asking about, but I find these “misplaced” dots in formated lists. There is dot situated over the text. I tried multiple browsers (Chrome, IE, Vivaldi) to ensure, that is not diplayed incorrectly due to my browser settings. See attached image for more details.

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woody

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It’s a known problem – very annoying, but not a showstopper. (Tracey’s ready to pull his hair out.)

I have a (long) list of known problems that we’ll tackle as soon as the bugs in the merge are ironed out. This is already on the list.

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It’s difficult to check… there appears to be some sort of corruption? For example, I carry out a search on “AutoHotkey – Check if SMB1 is disabled” (minus the quotes), i.e. a thread I posted on WSL, to check it imported OK into AskWoody… and I get this:

The ‘content’ of the FIRST returned result is OK but I don’t understand why the ‘In reply to’ result is wrong.

The SECOND returned result is completely wrong and doesn’t match the search string at all.

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woody

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The on-site search is a source of ongoing headaches. Most of the time I don’t have any idea what it’s doing – and why it’s taking so long.

It’s one of my top priorities as we gradually get things ironed out…..

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1,010 topics started by kathleen atkins are badly formatted, with tiny unreadable text, broken links and random tags.

Edit: Removed email addres for privacy reasons.

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b wrote:

topics started by kathleen atkins

Those would be the discussions about the newsletter articles. Kathleen used to post a topic for each different article, which WSL members found very useful. Iirc they had their own dedicated forum.

Lugh.
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Those should be fixed. I hope.

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This random(ish) one isn’t.
https://www.askwoody.com/forums/topic/natural-events-when-were-not-on-the-scene/

cheers, Paul

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I hope I’m not going OT here, but as more of my WS posts become visible here, one thing I’ve noticed is that, where I’ve provided a link, the link’s target is appended to the URL of the page the post is on; so you get to an error page. If that’s unclear, look at this one: post 1500635

As of this morning, I believe those have been fixed. Please double-check and point me to any remaining problems.

I’ve been out of town, so sorry for being late to the party. I took a look at tonyl’s post 1500635, but given Woody’s response (May 14, 2019) I’m not sure if I’m looking at the same thing tonyl was describing. It doesn’t look exactly like tonyl was describing, so I’m assuming something did get changed.

Nevertheless, it’s still not quite right. When I take a look at post 1500635, I see “Get it here[ /url]. Just enter your existing product code.” There is no clickable link.

Looking at the underlying page source for post 1500635, I see this code:

Get it < a href=”http://linkurl.com”&gt; < /a> here [ /url]

WSL used BBCodes so tonyl’s post would have originally been recorded with the code:

Get it [ url=”http://linkurl.com”%5D here [ /url]

The askwoody forum seems to use html so the underlying code in tonyl’s post should look like:

Get it < a href=”http://linkurl.com”&gt; here < /a>

Comparing the first and third code snippets shows what went wrong. WSL’s “here [ /url]” should have been imported as “here < /a>” but instead got imported as “< /a> here [ /url]”

I don’t know how this forum stores the posts in its database (are BBCodes stored as is, or are they translated to html first?), so I’m not sure what Paul would want to search for to find all affected posts. Is it as simple as searching for posts with [ /url]?

I searched for my imported posts and noted the same phenomenon on my posts. I haven’t been able to investigate any further because I can’t seem to edit any of my posts for some reason … guess I still have to figure out how to use some features of this forum.

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woody

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Confused? You will be…

Post #1500635 et al were as I described them, i.e., the links, instead of pointing to

[target]

were pointing to

[Ask Woody]/[my post list]/[target]

which of course doesn’t exist, and you wind up at Woody’s error page. The workaround, as I mentioned, was to place the cursor before [target] in the address bar, and mash Backspace.

Those posts have now been modified, with the result that they’re now broken altogether. Hence your confusion.

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Those posts have now been modified, with the result that they’re now broken altogether. Hence your confusion.

Ah, I see. So we were indeed looking at different things.

From what you say, it sounds like
[ url="link-url"] link-text [ /url]
got imported as
< a href="askwoody/link-url"> link-text < /a>
and was subsequently edited to
< a href="link-url"> < /a> link-text [ /url]
The link-url is now fixed (askwoody removed), but the closing A tag got in the wrong place which renders the link-text unclickable.

The link-url itself is still there and is now correct, but just unclickable. The orphaned BBCode [ /url] needs to be removed and the closing A tag needs to be moved so link-text is clickable. The link-text varies from post to post, so it’s not a straight search-and-replace, but a small script ought to be able to fix them in bulk, I’d think.

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That sounds about right; I’m sure it’ll get sorted eventually. I don’t expect to be able to edit them myself; on most forums there’s a time limit so I think that’s normal behaviour, and thinking about it I can see why.

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woody

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