Twokinds ARCHIVE Forums

ITS THE G**D*** MATRIX

lol... wish I could say i've seen it... but I havent

I saw it in one of Fooby's posts on the "What Made You Smile" thread in the Ranting Board. I verified that the post generated gobbetygook characters in both Firefox3 and IE7, the two browsers I happen to have on hand. Firefox generated weird looking garbage, and IE just made lots of those "I don't know what character this is" boxes. I was able to copy and paste the garbage into Notebook, where it remained garbage. I should do it in Vim and see what the character codes are...
-- Seems to like --
Hex code 0x3F3F particularly. Which doesn't map to anything in Times New Roman. No wonder IE just throws up its hands.

So my messing with the hex codes and the colors gave birth to this hellspawn?

NOT COOL. It keeps raping my posts in the smile thread.

EDIT: Ok, maybe not the coloring. But I can't help think I caused it. <_<

I've been seeing too it looks like weird bloched [censored] and i'm using firefox 3. it appears to just be the same blotches over and over again.

Caption: Something involving about how the Missingno's were killing my photobucket link. The picture still exists, but the link doesn't think so.

Okay, updated the screenies and added a couple more.

Another proof that IE doesn't even try :roll:

I'm not having problems at all, and I'm using Firefox 3 on a machine built for windows 98!

It's entirely sequential HTML glyphs, repeating over and over again...

This is what the individual glyphs are supposed to look like, with spaces between them...


So, from House's (⌂) experiments, IE, Chrome, Opera are choking on the glyphs, but Firefox, Safari and Flock show them and mash them together.


For some reason, the database is spewing repeated lines of glyphs, seemingly at random... (I'm assuming it's the database, not PHP choking on other/badly formatted text)

The funny thing is that there's nothing defined for those HTML codes; they're simply beyond the registered set. We've got three places that the bad data could get into the system. Working backwards, it could be on output -- something stored in the database chokes the parser. I expect most of the formatting BBCode tags aren't fully parsed until output (for some of them, like the smilies, that's about the only thing that makes the slightest bit of sense). If that's the case, editing or quoting the post might produce a "correct" looking post in the edit box, since that loads the unparsed quote into the textarea right out of the database.

The second place the error could enter into things is the database. If that's it, we're pretty much SOL, but unless this happens to a lot of people (and I've only seen it hit Fooby, though aj's screenshot looks like FastChapter's), that's somewhat unlikely. I'd expect a database problem to be much more widespread.

The third, and what I consider most likely, place for the error is on input parsing. Something that's being fed it (and Fooby might be right -- playing with the colors or something is responsible, I'm not sure) is making the input parser choke. We know significant input parsing is done for censoring words and the like. If it ran into something that it really didn't understand, it might mangle the text into unrecognizable garbage. Why it picks a number in the late 700's and counts up for a while, dumping the value as an HTML entity is beyond me though.

I agree with it probably being input parsing... the database stores everything plain text (so emoticons and the like would be done by PHP.)

I tried messing around (not here, on a old copy of phpbb), and one thing I noticed is that while BBcode is stored plain text in the db, but stuff gets added on. For example,

gets converted to


The numbers correspond to another field in the db called bbcode_uid, (img) and I don't know what that's a reference to, but the bbcode_uid changes whenever you edit a post, regardless of whether or not the post actually has bbcode in it.

I had a nice long post written out, but FF chose to crash, so that's the synopsis. Only thing I can think to do is restart the webserver, and maybe check the db... (but I think we've mostly established that the problem's not in the db.)

Also, the first instance of the 'missingnos' (sp?) that I saw is here.


Does typing in another language kill it too?
但是，我不知道为什么现在才开始。
Hmm... Nope. Just converts everything into HTML glyphs...

Sooo... how do you fix it?

The bbcode_uid is probably "unique id," though I'm not sure what its purpose would be either.


You've got me there. I'd probably start with "upgrade to phpBB3," since that would also fix the search and a handful of the other problems that we've seen. Fixing this problem might be a side effect. *shrug*

Fooby, and others, do any of your posts with this problem have something in common that your other posts don't? Maybe it's just something we can avoid?

Sounds like a


̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̌̍̎̏ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̌̍̎̏ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̌̍̎̏ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̌̍̎̏ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̌̍̎̏ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̌̍̎̏ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̌̍̎̏ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚
̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̌̍̎̏ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̌̍̎̏ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̌̍̎̏ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚
̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̌̍̎̏ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̌̍̎̏ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚
̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̌̍̎̏ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̌̍̎̏ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚
̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̌̍̎̏ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚
̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̌̍̎̏ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚



̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̌̍̎̏ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̌̍̎̏ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̌̍̎̏ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̌̍̎̏ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̌̍̎̏ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̌̍̎̏ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ ̌̍̎̏ ̛̛̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̙̜̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̕̚̚ess, if anything. <_<

I haven't been able to find a pattern.
So far it's only hit the Ranting board, as far as I can tell.


And here was was thinking the last three posts of page three with all the confusing talk was getting us somewheres D: