Jolt Country

(Imported from "Bulk Paste Test")

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Fri Sep 06, 2019 7:18 pm (or it has been set up to use the Wine Compatibility Layer) graphical mode is a different matter, but most (non-commercially developed) IF is still text-based. Nothing wrong with that, but GUIs have destroyed interest in TUIs[**] except by very dedicated players.

For some reason, every time - ad it was annoyingly consistent in its behavior - I tried to paste that particular paragraph in general, and one particular line of that pararaph (see below) in particular - and it was pasted from Notepad, so I know there are no special characters - it kept doing something to this BBS that seemed to either cause it to lock up, crash, and/or die.

So, being a scientist - or at least a researcher - I decided to do an experiment to try and isolate,or at least, perhaps track down, the cause of this abnormality and/or unsesired behavior. (undesired in my case, you may feel that any behavior of this BBS that stops me from posting is a fringe benefit, but unfortunately (for you) I disagree.

When I noticed my pasted message was crashing this BBS - or some unreasonable facsimile thereof - I started an experiment of pasting a paragraph at a time and doing a preview until trying to preview one of the paragraphs caused the BBS to kick me to Frobozz's obituary (the Main Page). Hitting the Back button and removing that last paragraph caused Preview to work okay. The next step was to do line-by-line restore and preview until a preview attempt tripped the failure and Preview again (in error) redirected to the main page. The suspect line was the one with "(non-commercially developed)" appearing in it, and I don't know why. The behavior was consistent, whenever that line appeared, the Preview and Post buttons stopped working (normally), and Frobozz waseulogized again.

Had this BBS not locked up and froze with a "taking too long to respond" error, my next step would have been to do a word-by-word restore/preview loop until I narrowed down to what character point it failed, but at that point I decided to just send Jonsey - and a few friends - a copy of the message and an indication of where this BBS was locking up.

Sometimes you just have to decide when it's time to quit. As apparently this BBS was wont to do. (And yes, that use of "wont" without an apostrophe is a valid word.)

No, I think it was pinback pasting the n-word too many times.

So, I have no idea how the BBS got off subsilver theme. So that's great.

There was some log about how it thought certain pieces of text were trying to do injection attacks. I spent 4 hours dealing with phpBB's shitty software last night (ok, it's not shitty but there are issues and when it fucks up, Christ does it fuck up) - I'll try to deal with it next chance I get.

As you noted, every time it saw "Wine Compatibility Layer" it blew up. I mean, that's not even an SQL stateent. If you're thinking about injection attacks, I'd be more interested in posts containing SELECT, DELETE, DELETE TABLE, DROP TABLE, INSERT, UPDATE, GRANT and similar lamguage. And with my luck I'll find this post will trigger something, the way they didn't for Little Bobby Tables. (If you've not seen that cartoon, go take a look, it's hilarious.)

Fortunately it should be pretty easy to go back through the Commander's posts and find the one or two errant symbols he's cut/pasted into posts.