Xweb's most famous bug: The "EDIT" Glitch

This one should get top billing on any bug report thread...!

Because we enabled everyone with a login to have "edit post" rights, this allowed a situation to develop where it becomes possible for one to have the "automagic html link converter" to perform multiple times on the same post, one when you made it and again when you go to edit.

The glitch is that when you go to edit the urls you typed in originally don't show up as you originally typed them anymore, they now show as html code, thanks to the first convert action, but after editing, if you go to post again they will be converted twice and this completely breaks the code that was created in the first round! This is what has happened when you might see someone's post with a ton of screwed up links in it that don't work and tags the post has been edited.

Let me explain, no no there is too much, let me sum up:

Let's say you originally posted an url:
http://www.anysiteurl.com/subdir/page.html

But when you arrive at the Edit screen, that is not what you get back, you now have the code that that created the first time which looks more like:
< a href="http://www.anysiteurl.com/subdir/page.html" target="_blank">http://www.anysiteurl.com/subdir/page.html<;; /a>< br />

Uh oh!! Well if you don't know any better, and just click on "Save" to recommit any changes, but leave that code as-is, then your post is going to get hosed, as the automagic tries A SECOND TIME to convert to code, and since the text now shows the URL more than once, well you can see where this is going... It's going to create some crap like:
< a href="< a href="http://www.anysiteurl.com/subdir/page.html" target="_blank">http://www.anysiteurl.com/subdir/page.html<;; /a>< br />< a href="http://www.anysiteurl.com/subdir/page.html" target="_blank">http://www.anysiteurl.com/subdir/page.html<;; /a>< /a>< br />

So this becomes a mess quickly, and completely hoses your post.

This issue ONLY effects SOME urls. Direct image urls are safe, but query image and web link urls are being double-converted.

So, what does this mean to you the user?

There are a couple of simple ways to work around this issue...

WHEN YOU EDIT A POST WITH URLS IN IT:

If you see ANY url converted to < img src=" code, you can safely ignore it.

If you see ANY url converted to < a href=" YOU MUST STRIP IT BACK TO JUST THE URL YOU ORIGINALLY POSTED.

Meaning turn this:
< a href="http://www.anysiteurl.com/subdir/page.html" target="_blank">http://www.anysiteurl.com/subdir/page.html<;; /a>< br/>

BACK into THIS:
http://www.anysiteurl.com/subdir/page.html

...before you commit your changes with "Save", and voila, all will again be right with the world

OR, As an alternative to having to strip the whole code back to the originally posted url, you could simply remove JUST the "http://" that is BETWEEN the > and the < /a>

Meaning turn this:
< a href="http://www.anysiteurl.com/subdir/page.html" target="_blank">http://www.anysiteurl.com/subdir/page.html<;; /a>< br/>

Into THIS:
< a href="http://www.anysiteurl.com/subdir/page.html" target="_blank">www.anysiteurl.com/subdir/page.html< /a>< br/>

This is less work than the first method, as you only have to knock out the second http:// (as opposed to the whole tag) and then it will never try to double-convert that link again (as you even can see here by that section of the example not lighting up), no matter how many times you edit the post (whereas the original workaround must be redone every time), BUT it is IMPORTANT that you knock out ONLY the SECOND http:// - NOT the first one.

Feel free to post any questions or requests for clarification

Peace, -Mac