How did the poster whose post I reported a few minutes ago get all that text into the subject box?



I could neither type nor paste it.

That was exactly my first thought when I saw it. It may be a property (bug?) of UBB.threads I don't recall seeing before, and one we'll look into.

It appears that this type of post is made by specialized spammer software exploiting HTML options that cannot be blocked effectively. We still can and will remove such posts manually, and appreciate our regular visitors' flagging them to expedite the cleanup.

On the form side it's relatively easy in Safari or Chrome to just remove the maxlength="50" via the Web Inspector, so an automated tool could just ignore / remove it as well. To stop it from occurring the php code would need to reject lengthy subjects before adding them to the database instead of just relying on the user manipulatable html front end.

Others may provide more details on the topic, but the critical word in my post above is 'effective'. The problem is that while blocking strategies are conceivable, they're also fairly easily circumvented.

It'd be interesting to see if this is something that could be accomplished via an AppleScript script.

Thanks for the explanation.

I'm going to guess that the same or similar software is used by some eBay listing apps to enable them to post item descriptions that are considerably longer than those I can post with the basic tools eBay has given me. (A completely unrelated mystery solved! )

The PHP could validate the subject string (or, alternately, the database could store the subject in a varchar(50) field), but neither of those checks is done in UBB; the UBB stores the subject in a text cell of the database and relies on the browser to limit the length.

A bit silly, really, but there it is.