Messed up format in this thread:

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http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt188345.html

Didn't want to bother in the mod attention thread, since it appears to be the only affected thread, and it's not really a moderator problem per se. Seems to have happened right after the post dated, Jan 31 2012 9:27 pm. Seen stuff like this happen due to something funky in the posts. Suspect that's what's going on with this. Might be something odd in that post breaking the page layout.

OMG that made me giggle. heeheehee. i dunno why that happens sometimes. hopefully alex will weigh in

I noticed that the bb tags are messed up a bit in that post, and it wouldn't surprise me if that's what's causing it. I've seen really weird stuff like that happen from weird things I've done in my own posts here and on other phpBB forums. I bet if you were to look open the edit page for that particular post, you'll find something weird in there, or maybe just fixing the bb code will correct it. Maybe, maybe not.

I have actually encountered odd word/letter combinations that have caused similar weird things like that. It definitely showed up right after that post was submitted. I'm nearly positive there's some odd thing in it that's triggering the html to screw up. If fixing the bb code doesn't fix it, there's no telling what's causing it.

Not that it's a big deal.

^^ Well spotted, that man!
One cautious tweak to the quoted text in this post http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp4368900.html#4368900 and formatting sanity is restored.

Cool!

ok, weird request... can someone mess up this thread like the other one so i can see what the messed-up code looks like? i didn't see what the code looked like before it was fixed.

I would try, but it takes a fairly unique set of code screw ups. I think there are several that will do it, but I doubt anyone would remember what any of them are.

In this case, it was just some extraneous bb code. Either there was some tags missing, or too many, or some were partial, or some combination of them. All I know is that I could see some tags (or was it partial tags) in the post, and suspected they were causing it.

If you know how to fix bb tags, and it happens again, all you gotta do is fix the tags. Usually.

I rather wish I'd made a note of what I corrected now...
Pretty sure I had it at one point but it didn't show in preview - and then I realised how involved this had suddenly become, with all the possible screwups and none of them showing until a post was actually made.
But that was basically the essence of it: BBCode is a bit fragile as implemented here so just get the tags properly paired up.

ohhhhhhh i know of another thread where it happened, and i tried pasting the posts, but i only did it in preview!! !! now it makes sense why i couldn't get it to work..... goes off to play in the sand...

I'm assuming there's a knock-on/global effect where the error affects the way a thread's display chain is created on the server before pumping it out to the viewer, so viewing an incorrectly formatted post in preview just shows... an incorrectly formatted post. (harmlessly messed-up quote blocks etc, but never a whole post's width screwed up)

Posting a long piece of text used to cause hassle. I wonder...

I guess I just answered the question?

Yep, that certainly worked...

so lau, do you know how to make it squished?

You don't. The whole point of "code" tags is that the text inside them must not be reformatted.

You can edit my post, to make the line short. Maybe just inserting spaces might help, but it shouldn't.
Inserting a few newlines will work. Or just delete the whole post.

no, what i mean is threads that are accidentally squished, like the one we were talking about in this thread. it happened accidentally because of the tags, but i was wondering how to make a page super-narrow on purpose. i found an old thread like that but when i tried to reproduce the problem i couldn't make it happen.

Ah. I don't know if I've seen the effect you are talking about, which seems to be the opposite of what I have done to this thread. Which old thread is it that you have seen the effect in?