In case any of you haven't noticed, posts seem to be dropping words today. The most affected words I've seen are "and," "or," and "to."

Just a heads-up. I've reported the problem but you may want to check your posts right after submitting them.

Capitalizing them seems to work.

Test: And "and" _and and

I haven't noticed those words dropping, but I have noticed for some time now that the forum will frequently drop the word "drop." I've also caught it erasing the word "erase" and deleting the word "delete."

Edit: A ha! It just dropped the first drop on this post, which I know I typed because I proofread before submitting. The good news is that the forum doesn't seem to parse edits the same way it does original posts; I haven't seen any words get dropped after an edit.

Edit 2: It also dropped the bolded "and." Thanks for the heads up =P

That sounds like a badly written filter to prevent SQL injection by removing anything that might be an SQL keyword.

So SELECT, UPDATE, INSERT,so on might get filtered out if the filter mistakes them for SQL code.

[Edit, but, strangely, it just took the 'AND' before "so on" that time.]

It will frequently a long dash: hyphens get by, but a long dash will just disappear. I can't tell you how many times this has happened to me, to my annoyance.

Definitely some kind of anti-SQL-Injection blacklist. Everything we're losing is a SQL keyword - "And", "Or", "Not", "Delete", etc. Likewise, double-dashes get removed as a double-dash is the SQL comment character, while a single dash is meaningless. I wonder if other DDL like "alter"proc invocations like "exec" get removed...

Interesting - that clearly explains why "drop" was dropped...

seems like if you put the word in quotes it stays. Your "delete" wasn't dropped, but mine, with no quotes, was.

Zozimus said:

Yeah. Assuming this SQL anti-hacking theory is true (and it sounds perfectly plausible to me) then any "extra" characters you add to such keywords would stop them from being the dangerous keywords this filter is concerned about. Quotes, dashes, whatever. The problem would be making a complete list of such keywords and remembering to add stuff to them each time.

If you edit a post to correct such removals they won't get taken out again, presumably because the forum doesn't process edits using XML or anything, it just takes it as straight text. Same reason why, if you edit a post and add a new quote it won't actually turn it into a quotation after the original publication - it isn't processing code anymore, just copy-pasting text to replace your original post with whatever you edited it to be.

Is there a way to edit a post once it's up? I don't see a button for 'edit' anywhere...

edit: ok, I see one on this post, but not earlier ones. Does that mean that I can't edit a post once it's been replied to? Or is it a matter of time passing?

Zozimus said:

Both, probably.