Strange looking thread!

[Lucius]

Do you see anything weird in the picture above? If you look closely, you may notice that the page numbers are arranged in the opposite way as usual (123...) and that a question mark is after ». I have to admit I don't remember seeing anything like this before, does anyone know what this is about?

Thread is posted in Economy > Economics > Speculation, direct link here

[pugman]

Do you see anything weird in the picture above? If you look closely, you may notice that the page numbers are arranged in the opposite way as usual (123...) and that a question mark is after ». I have to admit I don't remember seeing anything like this before, does anyone know what this is about?

Thread is posted in Economy > Economics > Speculation, direct link here

Yeah, I inspected the element, seems like the question mark is in the thread name itself, weirdly enough. I think its just a small bug where the reverse question mark isnt recognized by the HTML and has just pushed it to the side. Not a big deal to be worried about.

[bob123]

My guess would be that there is an arabic letter at the end which tells the software to write/read from right to left instead of the 'western' way from left to right.
Then, when the software parses and displays that topic, everything added to the end (the pages of the thread) will be written from right to left, resulting in exactly this.

That's obviously just a guess from me, but that bugs occurs quite often in different places where the input isn't sanitized well enough.  


Edit: The question mark definitely is the arabic version of the question mark. So the above written would definitely make sense here.

Edit2: It definitely is the question mark. I just created a new thread (title: "test؟") with the arabic question mark at the end and filled it with junk to reach 2 pages. It exactly behaves like the thread shown in the OP:

[SM23031997]

EDIT: bob123's statement is correct but it only works with digits.

ANSI doesn't support the character while UTF-8 does.

Don't know how it will show this test statement here if I put the ؟ in the middle of this line.

And how will it show the subject if I put one into it?

How it will show the number if I put them after that ؟ mark?

؟1234567891

How it will show the numbers if I put them after that ؟ mark with space in them?

؟1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Edit: Now, we all know how it works. It only works with the numbers

[bob123]

Edit: Now, we all know how it works. It only works with the numbers

Not only with the numbers.

If you closely look at the the thread:

Code:

؟ « 1 2 3  All »

While a normal thread with 3 pages would look like:

Code:

« 1 2 3  All »

The arrows («) are written from right to left too (« --> »).

Generally, it works with each characters.
But if you write your normal english chars, it sets the direction from left to right automatically. Therefore you can't inverse the usual letter this way.

[SM23031997]

If you closely look at the thread

Yeah, I haven't looked that closely.
As far as the forum is concerned, it will impact only a limited number of characters.
I did some random testing and Yes, the line was working fine after using the English character in a middle way.
Maybe, someone can explore it further and suggest a solution to prevent it.

[DdmrDdmr]

I thought this rang a bell (see Using symbols/special characters in the subject that make it unclicable؟), although on the thread started by @iasenko at the time, it seemed that the thread title with this effect was additionally unclickable from the list (which is not the case here).

This is an old bug that was never fixed. The problem is that characters from right-to-left scripts (such as Arabic) switch the text direction and, if they occur at the end of the subject line, it's never switched back afterwards, which (in at least some browsers, anyway) screws up the rendering of whatever follows.