Thread font stuck in italics

One of the threads in the politics section seems to have a rendering bug making all text italic:

https://maplewood.worldwebs.com/forums/discussion/subforum/biden-issues-pardon-for-hunter/politics-plus?page=next&limit=120#discussion-replies-3670829

this used to have more frequently years ago. The problem then was that the italics tag was not getting closed, or was otherwise being ignored. Jamie applied a fix which pretty much stopped it.

Not sure what happened in this recent thread. Usually, applying an italics tag in a reply to the offending post would fix it, but not this time.

well, I'll be. I see what the problem is, and it was caused by me.

In the screenshot below from that thread, you see that in terp's post, terp's name is in italics. so the previous post is causing the problem. that post is mine.

In my post, I had entered the following text as the last line of the post, which does not show up in the post, because of the way I entered it.

< I can't even figure out what to put here. there's just no one to compare too. >

except I used the actual < and > characters, and not escape codes, as I'm doing now. So I inadvertently opened an italics tag with the first two characters of my post. And because it was inadvertent, I didn't close it.

I thought that those characters were filtered out by the underlying MOL software, so as to avoid problems like this. I guess not?

Ah, makes sense. Yeah, would probably be best to make sure that's properly sanitized -- if you can get html tags through and parsed by the system, it's possible you can get other, less innocent tags (eg script tags that would execute JavaScript) through as well.

yeah, as I mentioned, I was pretty sure this kind of stuff was being filtered out. otoh, if it was filtered out, i wouldn't be able to insert a strikeout tag, as I think I can.

maybe jamie can chime in at some point.

I'll look into this in a bit - still trying to upgrade the server.  Once we move over - I'll be back to making updates.

jamie said:

I'll look into this in a bit - still trying to upgrade the server.  Once we move over - I'll be back to making updates.

yikes! still upgrading?