Can't post in sell & buy

[jay_drew]

<b>Problem with Your Input</b>

<b>I just tried to post a want to buy for Thom Hogans' Complete guide to the D7000 & this is what I got. I don't have any of these terms in my post.</b>

<hr>

<blockquote><p>We had a problem processing your entry:</p>

<ul>

<li>Because of abuse by spammmers, we can't accept submission of any HTML containing any of the following tags: <code>applet area base body button div embed fieldset font form frame frameset head html iframe ilayer input layer link marquee meta object option pre script select span style textarea /applet /area /base /body /button /div /embed /fieldset /font /form /frame /frameset /head /html /iframe /ilayer /input /layer /link /marquee /meta /object /pre /script /span /style</code></li>

</ul>

<p>Please back up using your browser, correct it, and resubmit your entry.</p></blockquote>

[lex_jenkins]

<p>Yeah, there's a glitch in the system that's designed to prevent spam. Unfortunately it interferes with ordinary copying and pasting if the formatted text includes the span tag. Happens to me occasionally. Try stripping the <span> tag and try again. Annoying, I know, but that's the usual culprit.</p>

[jay_drew]

<p>Thanks Lex,<br>

but what is spam tag? 1 of the reasons than I have resisted digital so much is that I really don't uderstand computers & all this B.S lingo<br>

Thanks JD</p>

[lex_jenkins]

<p>Heh! I should have distinguished between <span> tag, and *spam*. It did sound like I meant there's an HTML <spam> tag.</p>

<p>The <span> tag is among the most common HTML tags for organizing and formatting text elements online. It probably should be omitted from photo.net's *spam* filter because the <span> tag is even used by photo.net itself. Which means photo.net flags itself as *spam* when we try to copy from one part of the site to another.</p>

<p>I wouldn't say Jay's rant is unjustified. It's one of the most annoying quirks of photo.net but many of us have become so accustomed to the workarounds we've forgotten that it's really aggravating to many other folks who don't encounter this on other websites.</p>

<p>Retyping a paragraph or two may not be much of an inconvenience, but retyping an entire detailed tutorial, ad or other post can be a hassle.</p>

<p>Since retyping an entire post or ad can be a huge pain in the neck, let me suggest an alternative that I use a lot: NoteTab Light, a freebie version of an excellent alternative to the familiar Windows Note Pad. NoteTab Light offers some simple tools to format text to basic HTML, or to strip unwanted HTML tags. I use it often to strip HTML tags so that I can post to photo.net forums and portfolio photo comments. Usually all I need to do is copy the text from one place, paste it to NoteTab Light (or Note Pad), then recopy it from NoteTab Light and repaste it into the comment box.</p>

[lex_jenkins]

<p>Here's an example...</p>

<p>I just copied the text I wrote to accompany <a href="/photo/17737631"><strong>my own photograph</strong></a> on my own photo.net folder. But because it contains the <span> tag, either photo.net will reject it as part of a post to the Nikon forum, or the WYSIWYG reply box will strip out the offending tags. But it's inconsistent. In some cases the same copied/pasted text may be rejected as a comment on a photo or other part of photo.net. And I'm not even sure what the pattern is.</p>

<p>That's annoying.</p>

<p>So if I want to post pre-formatted text, I have to paste the text to a plain text editor like NoteTab Light, then recopy the text - sans HTML but with simple paragraph breaks intact - and repaste it to this reply on this forum. And if I want to post the comment with the HTML tags intact but without the actual formatting, I have to do the same thing (illustrated below the line).</p>

<hr />

<blockquote><span>Some folks I met tonight (Apr. 15, 2014) while I was prowling some alleys in my west Fort Worth neighborhood, looking for new graffiti, tags or anything that caught my eye. These fellows were preparing sugar cane for the Thai temple for the new year - this week or next?</span><br /><br /><br /><span>They said the sugar cane came from Florida. We only have beet sugar in Texas - not very decorative or festive. I told them I used to live in Georgia as a little kid and remember chewing on sugar cane from the nearby field while my neighbors harvested the cane.</span><br /><br /><br /><span>I was tempted to grab a piece and gnaw on it, but I'd just met them and didn't want them to think I'm any stranger than they probably already suspected, considering I'd appeared in a dark alley behind their restaurant.</span></blockquote>

[Ian Taylor]

<p>Try your local Craigslist while you're at it.</p>

[bgelfand]

<p>One way to remove all tags is to copy the passage then open Notepad and paste it. This will remove all tags. Copy the text from Notepad and paste it into photo.net as text. Of course you lose all formatting.</p>

[gungajim]

<p><strong><br /></strong>Lex, as I have said before, I respect your technical knowledge, but when it comes to glitches on a social media website, the objective should be for the website owner to fix them rather than to provide a long technical explanation on how to get around them. I am confident that less than 1% of PN users have any idea what you are saying. I would love to see what would happen if Facebook, Google, Amazon or any of the social media sites suggested a complicated technical workaround as a user solution. Zuckerberg would develop a serious case of the shingles if he saw something like this on FB. :-)</p>

[bobatkins]

<p>I'm sure that if Photo.net had Facebook's resources and Zuckerberg money, all the glitches on the site would vanish. Unfortunately, neither is the case.</p>

<p>I believe the Photo.net text editor is based on TinyMCE, an open source editor build on Javascript. I'm not sure if this cut and paste issue is a just a known bug or if it's also related to the implementation on photo.net. There are certainly reports of problems when cutting and pasting from word to TinyMCE - see http://www.tinymce.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=4183, so it doesn't look like purely a photo.net issue. There are some plugin fixes for some browsers and some cut and paste from Word issues - see http://www.tinymce.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=10409. However it looks like even the bug fix has bugs...</p>

<p>I agree it's annoying and needs fixing. In the absence of a fix, the workaround work for now, though clearly isn't the most desirable solution!</p>

 

<p>I don't know if there's a "plug and play" alternative to TinyMCE that would work. Writing such an editor from scratch wouldn't be a good use of photo.net resources.

[lex_jenkins]

<p>I know what you mean, Jim, and I agree.</p>

<p>For now the lesser of the evils would be to remove some of the spammer-thwarting filters. Sure, it *might* lead to more spam, but we have plenty of members who have the ability to flag and hide spam posts, which the moderators can review and delete as necessary.</p>

<p>Meanwhile, it would be less annoying to members.</p>