Journal - URL issue

[Alarra]

Hello, now that my character's essentially complete, I was putting together a journal entry that would contain a screenshot of every single one of my stats, with a link on the image to the full-size picture. I chose to do it this way so that my photo tab could be left for actual photos of my character rather than being all stats.

Anyway, it seems that the BBCode is acting strangely. As you'll see here, it seems to stop converting somewhere around my first URL tag. I've played around with it a bit:
- Adding tags like bold or italic immediately after the first bold "Skills and Perks" works fine.
- Adding images immediately after the first bold "Skills and Perks" works fine. If I have an image with the same URL further down on the page, that one works fine too.
- Adding a URL immediately after the bold "Skills and Perks" does NOT work, even if it's just a regular URL and not nested around an [img] tag.

So that suggests the issue is somewhere with URL. Is there a limit to the number of URLs you can have in a post and that's why it's breaking? (And if so, is it possible to make it higher?) Or is it a bug?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Tom]

Hi Alarra,

This is definitely a bug, as there is currently no set limit on how many links you can place in a journal entry, nor on how long entries can be. A nearly identical problem was reported in another bug report, and although the problem in that report was regarding BBCode parsing failing on the character Bio & Info page, I believe the core issue there is the same one that you're having.

Surprisingly, the bug doesn't seem to depend on the usage of the URL tag, nor on any tag in particular for that matter. What actually seems to be the problem is the length of the text that is being parsed by the BBCode parser. In both your case and in the case of the user who posted the other similar bug report, the BBCode worked just fine until one too many characters was added to the text of the page — once that one extra character was added, almost all BBCode stopped being parsed. If you were to erase that one extra character, however, then the BBCode would be parsed normally again, as if the bug didn't even exist. This has caused me to come to the conclusion that there is a bug in our current BBCode parsing system that is dependent solely (or at least predominantly) upon the number of characters in the block of text that is being parsed by the system. I'll have to delve into the technical side of this some more, but for now I'm at a loss as to what exactly could be causing this extremely odd behavior of the system.

Until I can pinpoint the exact issue here, I do have a suggestion for how you can at least fit some more links and images into your journal entry before the BBCode breaks on you. Since it seems that the BBCode breaks after an entry exceeds a certain character length, try taking each of the long URLs specified in both the URL and IMG tags in your entry's content, and replace those long URLs with "shortened" ones. You can generate shortened URLs using any URL shortener service on the Web, such as the Google URL Shortener or Bitly. Shortening the URLs in your BBCodes should create enough extra room in the entry to enable the BBCode to be parsed regularly again.

Thank you for reporting this, and I hope to have a fix implemented relatively soon!

[Alarra]

Thanks for the tip about the URL shorteners; I didn't think of that, and that did shorten it enough for the pictures/links to work properly. Good luck fixing it; hope it's something relatively easy!