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Out of curiosity...
#24719 01/08/13 06:35 AM
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How did the poster whose post I reported a few minutes ago get all that text into the subject box?

Quote:
that will make us all Try to laugh as well as a household cryHe's guy Family!Man is actually a You and me animated series brought to life by an Seth MacFarlane surreal sort of The particular together with Simpsons, swift fireplace together with gags pre


I could neither type nor paste it.


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Re: Out of curiosity...
artie505 #24725 01/08/13 03:06 PM
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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.


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Re: Out of curiosity...
artie505 #24735 01/09/13 03:39 PM
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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. cool


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Re: Out of curiosity...
alternaut #24738 01/09/13 08:16 PM
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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.


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Re: Out of curiosity...
Kevin M. Dean #24739 01/09/13 08:51 PM
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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.


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Re: Out of curiosity...
Kevin M. Dean #24740 01/09/13 11:02 PM
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It'd be interesting to see if this is something that could be accomplished via an AppleScript script.

Last edited by dkmarsh; 01/09/13 11:31 PM. Reason: Thought better of it.


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Re: Out of curiosity...
alternaut #24741 01/10/13 03:28 AM
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Originally Posted By: alternaut
It appears that this type of post is made by specialized spammer software exploiting HTML options that cannot be blocked effectively.

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! smile )


The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.

In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
Re: Out of curiosity...
Kevin M. Dean #24743 01/10/13 06:28 AM
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Originally Posted By: Kevin M. Dean
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.


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.


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