Is there a bug affecting links in PMs on PF?

[DaveC426913]

I've come across a bug that affects links in PMs. I don't know how wide-spread it is.

I PM'd a member, and in my PM, I included a link to a PF post (all I did was paste the URL, PF formatted it as per below).

The link itself (which goes to Lame Jokes post #6046) is correct. In the first screenshot, you can see the URL in the bottom task bar (green arrow). The second screenshot shows that one is taken to the correct post.

But look at the text that PF added when it formatted my link (red arrow). That is not the text from post #6046; it is the text from a completely unrelated post: #6024 (no idea why that one, not the same author, not even the same page).

This caused some confusion in our conversation, because the recipient saw the auto-included text and assumed I was talking about post 6024, when in fact I was talking about post 6046.

(Following the link goes to the correct post#):

 

[mfb]

I can reproduce the bug but I have no idea where it comes from, probably deep in the forum software. Three posts from the last page (242) both lead to this post on page 241. A post on page 240 leads to another (but also wrong) post from page 239. Posts from page 1 show the very first post of the thread. It is not limited to PMs, it also happens in threads, both in the preview and the final post. It happens with both link formats ("/post-6215528" and "/page-242#post-6215643"). It is not limited to this thread, I found the same issue in another thread but with a different offset.
Could be linked to deleted posts messing up the counts?

This bug doesn't matter if you format links, of course.

Examples:

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/collection-of-lame-jokes.25301/page-242#post-6215643
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/collection-of-lame-jokes.25301/post-6215528
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/collection-of-lame-jokes.25301/post-6213813
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/collection-of-lame-jokes.25301/post-6208682
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/collection-of-lame-jokes.25301/post-209141
Other thread:
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/pf5-problems-and-errors.968696/post-6211483

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

So this isn't a bug, just how the link unfurler works. When you link to a post, it doesn't have it's own meta data as it isn't a unique page on it's own. A page can consist of many posts of course. The unfurler just checks the first 100 lines of a webpage for the meta description and uses that. The meta description is built from the data from the first post of a page. So this isn't a bug, but rather an understandable limitation when linking to a specific post.

If you see an unfurl issue, edit the post, go to bbcode mode and set unfurl="true" to unfurl="false" in the URL bbcode.

 

[DaveC426913]

If you see an unfurl issue, edit the post, go to bbcode mode and set unfurl="true" to unfurl="false" in the URL bbcode.

TIL: what 'unfurl=true/false' does.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

TIL: what 'unfurl=true/false' does.

Unfurled true
https://www.physicsforums.com
Unfurled false
https://www.physicsforums.com

 

[OCR]

Oh !

I think I found "the bug". . .Look at post #360 by fresh_42. . . because of my ad-blocker, I see something

different than most of you probably see.

What I see is. . .

I made the next post, which included the post by fresh_42 as a quote.

This is what I see. . .

See that bug?!I'll bet it slipped in through Facebook, somehow. . . .

.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

See that bug?!

That is your ad-blocker. Nothing to do with PF. Try white listing facebook in your ad blocker.