Messed up format in this thread:

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http://www.wrongplanet.net/postx160890-30-0.html

it's killing meeeeeeeeeeeeee.

i tried copying and pasting the contents of every post in the page. it's very similar to the problem in the thread that MrXxx had pointed out, but Cornflake corrected it somehow. i didn't see the messed up tags before it was fixed.

I just tried duplicating the formatting of the post you linked, since it seems to be the only one on that page with BBCode block nesting errors, but it produced no odd effects.
It's also odd that the post following it "resets" the narrowed formatting too. (also tried here; no effect)

From the page you linked to above, we get 159 Errors, 333 warnings from the HTML check at http://www.w3.org and their CSS check finds 61 errors.

Looking at the page itself, what has happened is that the two halves of the table have somehow been broken apart. The latter half is working roughly as it should, but the first half has become a separate table and it has been forced to fit into one column of that later table.

The break might be associated with some Google advert code that seems is injected into the HTML at about that point. I couldn't be bothered to wade through the buggy code to figure it all out - there are tables within tables, ad infinitum.

Backs away quietly...

ohhhhh ok. thanks for looking into that. it's fascinating. wish i understood it better

...if by "fascinating" you mean "mind numbingly broken" then yes, yes it is

i like things that are mutated and, well, wrong. and broken too.

in this thread MrXxx was pointing to a post that had messed up formatting cuz of the tags being screwed up. do you have any idea how the tags could have messed up formatting for a page? it was already corrected so i didn't get to see how it was wrong to begin with. i googled and googled and couldn't figure it out

This is the short version:

Web sites are made up of boxes inside boxes. The way those boxes are traditionally defined has changed over the years, but they're all still boxes inside boxes. You start with the box that is the page, and from there you're pretty much defining different sized boxes, and that's how you make a website. Then you fill the boxes with stuff.

Problem is, when a big box gets put inside a small box, or code changes the size of boxes somewhat arbitrarily, or you put too much stuff in a box for it to display within it's bounds, unpredictable things happen. The result of which is what you see.

thank you!! !! could you mess up this page right now if you wanted to? like, make the boxes all squished up?

i'm embarrassed to even ask this, but are those boxes like frames? or content within frames? or is that something else altogether?

If I'm not mistaken, they're tables. Sometimes, depending on the site, the tables can be inside divs.

One common way to screw up pages on sites like this is to place a line with no breaks in it by either holding down a key (letting it type repeatedly) long enough to type a line longer than the width of any particular user's screen:

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Even though the edit table forces a return in edit view, when it actually posts, the whole thing will display as a single line, forcing a horizontal scroll bar on the page. By doing that, any other line on the page, even if it contains spaces, will now also show up longer than the screen width, requiring horizontal scrolling to read the whole line.

Notice it affects every post on the page!

Not good, but phpBB 2 (and possibly version 3 too, I'm not sure), isn't designed to avoid that.

Long line of emoticons, copied and pasted repeatedly can also do the same thing. I believe it only works if no spaces are inserted between them.

The effect we were seeing on the page in question is the opposite, caused by certain incorrect BB code entries.

I'm not sure which ones.

(If this is too troublesome, I'll take it out)

BTW: I'm pretty sure that attempting to "squish" the tables with incorrect BB code will not work now, until that line of x's is taken out.