too much bbs leads to 
Efforts to immanentize the [OBJ]aton notwithstanding, [OBJ] is not yet omnipresent and must occasionally take a nap.
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Which is why [OBJ] will always remain the [OBJ] of our affections. 
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Oh no! The Grio has been hopelessly overrun by hordes of [OBJ] !
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An article about precognition? C’mon @OBJ you aren’t even trying anymore!
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Obvious bullshit jolts
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C’mon @OBJ you aren’t even trying anymore!
It’s been nonstop at [OBJ] central ever since the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago - late nights pushing out updates to the numbers stations, weekends populating the [OBJ] autonomous fundraising stripware with the names and bank account information of 2,718,282 newly disaffected QAnoners - it’s possible that [OBJ] has let some regular commitments slip somewhat.
But be forewarned! This frenzy is the calm before the derecho!
In September, the Law of the Square of Primes will cause flaring pleiadic radiation to heterodyne with FRB 180916.J0158+65 and reveal the blackmatter door inside a box of illegal testosterone supplements hidden at latitude 30.141798, longitude -97.831332. If, at that moment when the meson barrier is weakest, the benthic dancers complete their invocation to Saint Methuen and whisper sweet spam-inflected nothings to the Great Indivisible Hand of the Market, then surely will this age end in fire so terrible that the sun will hide its face and the moon will gaze upon an ash-blown ocean, glutted on silence and empty of everything except for Malthus rowing his lifeboat across the horizon to Trinidad and Tobago.
[OBJ]
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Given the horrors of the looming apocalypse, it says much for [OBJ] that [OBJ] still takes time to consider the plight of blind dogs.
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[OBJ]
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their trying to scam the [OBJ]:
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I just saw this too. At the risk of being helpful and runing everybody’s fun, I took the text in the title from the BBS post in Dev Tools:
… fed it into a hex editor, and I got this:
Note the final character at 0x35: 00 – a null character.
However, when I look at the post in the WordPress side there’s no weird characters:
I seem to recall that there’s some custom code for BoingBoing that takes posts from the WordPress blog and creates topics in Discourse from them.
Taking all this under consideration, I can make some guesses:
- Since this seems to only be happening on Mark’s posts, he’s probably using a custom tool to author posts to BoingBoing
- Sometimes this publishing inserts a null in the title and this goes into the database WordPress uses
- The WordPress front-end (i.e. the blog) strips this out before displaying it
- The process that creates Discourse topics from WordPress doesn’t strip these out and thus you end up with those
[OBJ]thingys.
I obviously have no way to validate these guesses but someone with access to the backing database like @orenwolf could easily check for this. If this is the case, I’d imagine fixing this would be as simple as tweaking the WP to Discourse pipeline to strip out trailing nulls from post titles.
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That’s just what they want you to think.
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That pipeline is simply the WP-Discourse plugin:
Good news is this is an officially supported plugin, and so in theory the Discourse folks can correct this behaviour.
Thanks for doing the legwork on this!
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Thanks for the info on the plug-in.
I think this might be where the problem can be mitigated:
Calling trim on the output of wp_strip_all_tags seems like it should do the trick by stripping out those trailing nulls (and any other potential bad data that could cause this).
Obviously this all assumes this bad data originated in the underlying data store and I have no ability to check this myself.
HTH
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How are you getting the null character? I tried getting the title into a hex editor a few different ways (copying text directly from the browser display, copying from dev console, getting the raw HTML with curl), and each time I get EF BF BC, i.e. the hex code for the object replacement character in UTF-8 (which is also present at the end of the URL of the Wordpress post: .../watch-street-scammers-get-busted-as-they-are-scamming%ef%bf%bc.html). Couldn’t that null be an artifact from your copying method?
There’s a Wordpress bug report about this, and the solution looks like it will involve adding this particular character to a search-and-replace blacklist, because as a valid printable character it wouldn’t be filtered out by any trivial sanitizer like trim():
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There will be no blacklisting the [OBJ]. It knows the way. It has seen the light. Accept @OBJ as we have!
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I copied the raw text from the title from dev tools which was where I got that null char, but as you say things can be happening that are skewing the results.
This is why we need to know what binary data is in the DB for the title.
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