Still Cant Edit Some Pages
Still Cant Edit Some PagesWhen you get this problem, go to the TIF settings window, select "Every visit to the page" and click OK, then click OK on the Internet Options window that you returned to. Now click in the address box, make sure the url there is correct and press Enter. If you still get a blank screen instead of the editing page, hold down the Shift key and click on the Refresh button. If you still get the problem, change the url in the address bar, replacing "wiki" with "wiki/wiki" and press Enter. Also try this link: hZtZtZp://c2.com/cgi/wiki?cols=19&edit=WhyCantiEditJamesKjxNoble?. Now answer the questions below.
Okay, there I am on an edit page. I do my editing and hit the Save button. Instead of Ward's "Thank you for editing..." page, I see a blank page and my edits don't take effect. The title bar and address bar for that blank page says hZtZtZp://c2.com/cgi/wiki?page=WhyCantiEditJamesKjxNoble? (without the Z's).
Setting the TIF's "Every visit to the page" appears to have no effect.
Have you checked the machine for malware? Some evil IE plugins can be really persistent.
My friend doesn't keep a log of what he installs and uninstalls when, but he's quite good at practicing safe computing. For example, he trashes mysterious e-mail and doesn't let stuff through the firewall willy-nilly. Nevertheless, I don't recognize the following IE plug-ins": "Windows Genuine Advantage Validation Tool", "FileOpenInstaller". I can provide more details about these if you want.
I've wikied off and on from his machine for the past year and a half without trouble. My wiki troubles are recent. And so what about his machine is recent? He had been using a dial-up connection. He got set up with a Verizon DSL a few weeks ago. Also a few weeks ago, he installed Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger. Verizon put a toolbar in his IE, and so did Yahoo. Yahoo also put a "Yahoo! Services" menu item in his IE Tools menu. I have not yet experimented with turning off these toolbars.
My recent editing problems seem to occur with pages whose contents include a "wiki question-mark" link. So I've mangled the http links on this page with Z's, and it seems to help a lot, though I don't understand why. Please don't create any http links if they contain question marks, or make sure you mangle them. That should help. Oh, and you might as well delete the stuff on BenAveling's page.
Possibly a stupid question but is the machine otherwise healthy? Last scandisk was recent? Plenty of diskspace? -- BenAveling
I don't know when the last scandisk was other than whatever scan is done when the computer boots. I do know the machine is healthy overall.
I know JamesKjxNoble?'s page used to have a complicated AltaVista link with a plus sign immediately followed by a minus sign, and I couldn't edit his page. Just tonight, now, I've been glancing at articles on the web about CeePlusPlus and I've seen it show up in the browser as C followed by a little box. I've also seen C plus plus zero ex show up as C followed by a Hebrew bet with a line over it. Perhaps the wiki editing trouble has something to do with a character/font substitution problem. I've removed all languages except US English from the IE Language Preferences. That at least fixes the way C plus plus shows up. I recall my friend installed some fonts not long ago... -- Eliz
Elizabeth, no reason to get suspicious on your computer now, and it has surely nothing to do with fonts. If it was a virus or something it would byte on other pages as well, without peculiar URLs. Most people around here being geekish, they use some Firefox/Mozilla and apparently are not bitten by the bug.
But since both IE and Firefox mozilla are very much standards compliant, the difference would make sense to me only if the pages you cannot edit contain HTML errors for which error recovery is obviously different - some invalid HTML is screwing up IE. Sure enough the page you referenced contains a handful of errors, see http://validator.w3.org , which probably are handled gracefully by Firefox but not by IE. You can bring this to Ward's attention and/or switch to Firefox.
Yes, and I confirmed in my IE as well. Among the obviously missing things:
<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> <html> ... </html>Ward should definitely fix this. -- CostinCozianu
Hi, Costin. It's not my machine (OS X with Firefox) that has the problem editing some wiki pages; it's my friend's machine (Win XP with IE) that has the problem. I don't mean to imply anywhere above that I think there's a virus or malware. I believe the machine is clean. As for invalid HTML, all the pages on this wiki are invalid. Sad to say, Ward creates pretty lousy HTML. Nevertheless, there might be something about a few pages that make them more invalid than usual. If the problem has to do with IE not handling bad HTML gracefully, other people out there should be able to experience my editing problem when they use IE (even if they normally use Firefox). And as for Firefox, I'd love my friend to switch, but he's in a worried twit that Firefox might screw up WordPerfect and DragonNaturallySpeaking?. Also, he needs to talk to his computer using Dragon because he has bad hands and we don't think Firefox will listen to him.
At the moment, I can't edit JamesKjxNoble? and WhyCantiEditJamesKjxNoble?. They both contain some ugly links. And guess what: the C plus plus rendering problem is intermittent. It seems that getting rid of foreign languages in the IE preferences is not a true fix for that.
-- Eliz
Okay then, Eliz, I agree that "malware" is very unlikely, so the problem must somehow relate to well-intentioned software installed, which is somehow affecting some links and the post that Save does (subject to webpage content), but not urls that you type into the address bar yourself. If the pages you can't edit are simplified to exclude links that trigger your problem, you should then be able to edit them, but that is avoiding the problem rather than finding a cure. If you view the source for the edit-page for a page that you can save and compare it with the source for one you can't save, you might see some relevant difference, but doing so will merely be an interesting observation, not a cure. Another means of avoiding the problem might be installation and use of a different browser, but I don't know for certain whether WordPerfect or DragonNaturallySpeaking? would be affected (although there's no obvious reason why they would be). To move towards a cure, you will need to experiment with disabling (or uninstalling) any software that might be causing the problem. You could do such testing piecemeal or you might be able to take advantage of any system restore points that happen to have convenient dates. Despite my initial remark about "malware", I would suggest running Spybot Search & Destroy (http://tucows.nyi.net/files/spybotsd14.exe) on the PC if you've not already done that, although spyware is unlikely to be involved.
One more thing - copy the url that lets you edit but not save to the clipboard, then click on Start and then on Run and type in MSHTA followed by a space and then paste in the url and click on OK. (When appropriate, tell the firewall that MSHTA may access the internet.) That should take you to the edit page. Make an edit and try to save it. Does the save succeed this time? After that experiment, close the editing window, which may have lost focus.
MSHTA results: I edit a page using "mshta hZtZtZp://c2.com/cgi/wiki?edit=WhyCantiEditJamesKjxNoble?" then hit Save. A fresh IE browser window shows up. It is blank. Its title bar and address bar are hZtZtZp://c2.com/cgi/wiki?page=WhyCantiEditJamesKjxNoble?. My edit doesn't take.
My friend runs some adware/spyware destroyers each month. I should find out exactly what he's running. Some are malware themselves. He has the spybotsd14.exe installer, but I can't for the life of me figure out where he installed the app. Maybe he didn't. Do you know the name of the installed executable?
Are all the editing links changed in that way, even the EditPage and EditCopy links, and is the equals sign for the cols parameter changed as well?
No, your understanding is backwards. Maybe you missed out on what I said earlier on one of these pages. All the links in the "edit page" html source have an equals sign except for the ones I typed with "plus ay dee zero minus." Why did I type some that way? Because that's how the blank edit pages look in my internet cache. The weird thing is, the funny symbols I typed become equals signs in the browser view of edit page, the browser view of the ordinary page, and in the browser view of the history file. If they are equals signs in the ASCII history file, then I imagine the wiki database has stored them as equals signs. So what turns my handful of deliberate "plus ay dee zero minus"es into equals signs in the first place, and more interesting, what turns only those equals signs back into the five symbols in the html source?
Equals signs are not the only URL symbols to get mysteriously mangled. If you look at WhyCantiEditJamesKjxNoble? you will see some http links that contain percent signs. When I click on those links, I am taken to blank edit pages whose percents show up in my cache as "plus ay cee you minus". Hence, the mysterious transformation is not to/from hex.
The fact that the weirdness always starts with a plus and ends with a minus reminds me of markup languages or old DOS formatting/printing codes or old Baudot shift codes. As soon as I think of Baudot, I think of teletype modems. And as soon as I think of modems, I think of the new DSL modem... I also think of Yahoo Messenger... (Oh, I checked a Baudot table. The gibberish is not Baudot.)
You could install Firefox on your friend's PC, and tell it not to be the default browser. Then, he can continue to use his computer the way he is used to, and you can use Firefox for wiki.
A fine idea :-) but he's still too worried about anything hosing his precious WordPerfect.
Then pick up a copy of NortonGhost?, image his partition(s), install FireFox, and test WordPerfect. If it's broken, revert to images. Granted, this requires a spare partition, but if the guy's got the screaming meemies at the thought of changing his system, he should image his system regularly anyway.
He has Norton Ghost, and he used it a few days ago to revert back to some state or other. Let's all drop the delightful Firefox suggestion because it doesn't solve the mystery anyway. Nevertheless, I can use your Norton Ghost argument to encourage him to let me install Firefox. :-)
What version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking is installed?
7.30.000.114 SP2. If you're wondering whether this will talk to Firefox, see above. But if you discover the answer is yes, this version of Dragon will enable my friend to talk to Firefox, please say so.
Back to our regularly scheduled program already in progress...
A new development. I reverted some "hoohahaha" garbage that was on JohnRepici's page. Now I have intermittent trouble editing JohnRepici. There's a pattern to it, though. If I launch IE and John's is the first page I try to edit, everything's fine. If I try to edit several pages then try to edit JohnRepici, everything's fine. If I even look at JamesKjxNoble? or WhyCantiEditJamesKjxNoble? (I can't edit them) then try to edit JohnRepici, I can't edit JohnRepici. The odd thing is, I've Z'ed out the http links on John's page but still can't edit his page after viewing a bad Kjx page. I need to relaunch IE before I can edit the JohnRepici page. Then I'm okay again with John's page. It's bizarre that just looking at page X or page Y prevents me from editing page Z during a given browser session. -- ElizabethWiethoff
Do you have your friend's installation CD (not just recovery CD) for Windows XP Professional SP1? If not, what CD does he have instead?
He's never had a Win XP CD. His machine came without a CD. It was a super bargain, but the fact that he can't install/reinstall/repair Win XP is part of his (I say unfounded) heebie-jeebies about installing Firefox.
Now that I'm using my own happy machine, I can edit pages just fine. I have no desperate craving to wiki from his machine. But, yeah, it's still a mystery what about his machine screws up some Edit page loads.
The next step is to improve confidence by running spybot and then (from Start, Run) the "sfc /scannow" command. If that command ran without finding significant errors (unfortunately, any repairs would need the CD he doesn't have), please answer this question - "Does the "C:\windows\windows update setup files" directory exist on your friend's PC and contain ie6setup.exe and various other files? Don't run it yet, even if it's there. If the answer was "no", does his PC have full use of Windows Update? Also, does he have the means to reinstall Dragon NaturallySpeaking in case that becomes necessary? I assume that its installer has the ability to reinstall the software whilst retaining existing data files.
I can work on this later after he goes to bed. Yes, he does have the Dragon installation CD, and he has to reinstall Dragon after every update of WordPerfect or his OCR program. He has a boatload of installer CDs but not a Win XP installer CD. I think only XP SP2 customers get "full use of Windows Update," although I'm not sure what you mean by that. He updates with critical patches every couple months or so...
Aha! I'm editing this page from my friend's Internet Exploder on Win XP! 21-Aug-2005.
I had a brilliant thought shortly before I went to bed. Hence, I couldn't sleep and decided to act on the thought. First some background. Go to http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2004/ and notice all the instances of "C++" and "C++0x". If I launched my friend's IE6 and went to that page, everything looked fine. However, if I looked at JamesKjxNoble? or WhyCantiEditJamesKjxNoble? and later went to the C++ page, I would see "C" followed by a little box and "C" followed by a Hebrew bet with an overbar. My brilliant thought tonight was, "Duh. Check what text encoding the browser is trying to use."
Auto-Select encoding was turned on. Let's say it's turned on. For many pages (such as http://learn.perl.org/library/beginning_perl/) IE6 auto-selects Western European ISO. For the above C++ page, the browser tries to auto-select Unicode UTF-7 left-to-right (there's no obvious reason why) and the Hebrew character shows up here and there. For C2 wiki pages, my friend's IE6 auto-selects Western European Windows. There's no obvious reason why it should select this character set, but that's what the browser does when it sees a wiki page. If I turn off Auto-Select and insist on Western European ISO, I can edit the problematic wiki pages. I can still edit the pages after that no matter whether Auto-Select is on or off or the ISO or Windows charset is selected. The mere fact that Western European ISO is listed in the Auto-Select menu seems to solve the problem, though I'm not sure why.
Maybe something about the Verizon DSL toolbar or Yahoo toolbar installation screwed around with my friend's charset settings. Maybe Ward should specify a charset in an html meta tag.
Oh, I installed and ran Spybot S&D. The system was clean except for the DSO Exploit. I fixed it.
It would seem you've uncovered an obscure bug in (sorry, "feature of") IE6. I'll see if I can easily duplicate it on my PC (which doesn't have those toolbars installed). What did you mean by the "Auto-Select menu"? Can't any available encoding be auto-selected when auto-select is on? I note that changes to the encoding can cause the current page to be refreshed, losing unsaved edits. I'm not sure if the DSO Exploit can be reported again, but it can be prevented if it is. An up-to-date IE6 is not vulnerable to it anyway. Out of curiosity, does Windows Update offer your friend's PC XP SP2?
By "Auto-Select menu" I meant the list of charsets immediately beneath the term "Auto-Select", not the list of charsets next to "More". Up until a couple hours ago, the menu next to Encoding contained only
Auto-Select Western European (Windows) MoreNow it contains
Auto-Select Western European (Windows) Western European (ISO) MoreThe ISO entry showed up when I unselected Auto-Select and selected ISO from More. If ISO is already in your list, you might have trouble reproducing my bug. You might be able to reproduce it by unselect Auto-Select and selecting Western European (Windows). Then see if you can get to Edit WhyCantiEditJamesKjxNoble?. Also see how http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2004/ looks.
It is already in the list, and it seems that any encoding is shown in the list once it's been selected. There's no apparent way of removing an encoding from the shortlist.
Yep, there doesn't seem to be a way to remove items from the short list, short of editing the registry, I suppose. Now I'm curious. Select Auto-Select and go to the C++ page. What charset does IE6 auto-select for that page? Do you have Hebrew fonts installed? Anything right-to-left?
I haven't been able to reproduce the bug at all. On going to the C++ page with Auto-Select on, Western European (Windows) was selected and Left-To-Right Document and Right-To-Left Document are not shown (but reappear if I select Unicode(UTF-8), say). I don't recall installing Hebrew fonts, but how can I tell if they're installed?
The Hebrew fonts would show up in your Fonts in your Control Panel. :-)
There are various fonts listed there, but none beginning with "Hebrew". Would you like me to install the Hebrew language pack?
You probably don't have any Hebrew fonts installed. Don't go through the trouble of installing the Hebrew language pack. My friend's Hebrew fonts come from his WordPerfect installation and some web downloads, I think. I know he installed some fonts a few weeks ago, but I'm under the impression they're all a bunch of math fonts I pointed him to from the Mozilla MathML project.
Here's a theory. Maybe the presence of a boatload of math fonts causes IE6 to be extra sensitive to the characters in an html page when the page does not specify an encoding and Auto-Select is selected. Maybe the preponderance of equals signs or percent signs or plus signs or something in a page causes IE6 Auto-Select to trip up. And if these equals and plus and percent and minus signs are supposed to go in a fixed-width font in an Edit page form, IE gets even more confused and can't display the page.
Sounds a bit tenuous. Were there any plus and percent signs originally? A few equals signs is nothing unusual. In any case, it's unclear why the problem went away. If we can't tell Microsoft how to duplicate it, it's unlikely they'll track it down.
The JamesKjxNoble? page originally contained a URL that contained an equals sign and later a plus sign immediately followed by a minus sign. (It was a complex and obsolete AltaVista search which I wanted to bring up to date.) Next thing I know, I'm typing URLs into WhyCantiEditJamesKjxNoble? that contain equals and plus then zero minus. Pretty soon you're (I think it was you, IIRC) entering percent signs. The C++ page contains a lot of plusses. It also contains C++0x, which looks like weird math. My theory could very well be tenuous, though.
Was the PC rebooted from time to time? Have any other quirks been occurring?
It gets rebooted every time someone sits down to use it because we power down completely when we're finished. No quirks for at least a month, I think.
Since this odyssey has been going on for a while without resolution, I thought I'd join the herd and see what I could figure out.
I can tell you what the distal cause of the problem is, but not the proximal cause nor cure.
Starting with evidence "hZtZtZp://c2.com/cgi/wiki" -- that suggests a Unicode issue, since there's a 'Z' pad in between the 4 ascii chars in 'http' (ascii is plane 0 of Unicode, and so the UTF16 encoding of an ascii string will be the original ascii octet followed by a null, which could be displayed in any number of odd ways).
Comparison with Unicode tables and googling around didn't really get me anywhere, but along with previous comments about ISO code set versus Windows code set seems to confirm that there's some kind of character set issue at the heart of it that is deeply confusing IE.
Changing my googling strategy I then immediately find a similar problem here and there on the web. The bottom line seems to be that it's a problem with Microsoft software using a binary RichTextFormat encoding and then it getting encoded (in email, on web sites, whatever), via "Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable" (that encoding showed up everywhere that I saw "+AD0-" on web sites -- not that I can google on the + and - part of the string, but I did see it multiple places)
See for instance an email to a list that exhibits the problem (search for "+AD0-" in particular), note that it has that encoding plainly shown:
...and then note the offender's explanation ("outlook + rich text"): What to do about this, I'm unsure, but hopefully this will suggest something to someone. -- DougMerrittHi, Doug. Thanks for the research and insights so far. Yep, I'd say there's some sort of encoding confusion. But, in your researches, ignore the Z's sprinkled hither and yon. I deliberately typed the Z's in some URLs a few days ago. The Z's make the links not link. By typing unlinkable links while writing about them I was preventing yet more Kjx discussion pages from becoming uneditable. The Z's on this page kept this page editable. Now that I'm using my own happy OSX machine with Firefox and I discovered the encoding Auto-Select workaround on the Win XP IE6 box, the Z's should no longer be necessary. I should remove the Z's and see how IE6 behaves.
Meanwhile, I read your http://listserv.unb.ca/bin/wa?A2=ind0201&L=apl-l&D=0&T=0&P=5015 and notice not only "Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable" but 'charset="utf-7"'. As I said above, IE6 tries to Auto-Select UTF-7 for this listing of C++ papers: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2004/
Your http://listserv.unb.ca/bin/wa?A2=ind0201&L=apl-l&D=0&T=0&P=5777 page mentions another offender: a news reader. Maybe my friend's problem has to do with all the Yahoo crap he installed. There's probably some sort of Yahoo News app or toolbar. I should check. Oh, for what it's worth, my friend has never ever had any Microsoft Office installed on this machine. He keeps it Microsoft-free except for the OS, IE (which is tangled in with the OS), and Outlook Express (which is tangled up with IE).
Never say never. You know how it goes: catch the merest whiff of a trail, and sometimes that leads to the serious hunt. You are specifying things that could not be a problem; naturally that helps narrow down what could be a problem - as of course you know.
If it turns out to look like it might be something in the Registry, let me know - I'm not an M$ expert, but I have had occasion to do a lot of Registry edits in recent memory (sigh...:-( recently. -- Doug
P.S. speaking of which, don't rely on just one anti-spyware; my recent experience (including the one you mentioned) showed me that one needs always at least two that are recommended. I unfortunately needed more like 5....some registration-ware, which found problems but refused to fix if I didn't register, but they told me what part of the registry had the spyware, so I fixed with regedit by hand...blech! But I don't want to pay $$$ to 5 sapsuckers.
P.S. remind me whey I even *have* a Windoze laptop in addition to Linux desktop. Maybe I'm an idiot (that's rhetorical - no rhetorical agreement, please ;-) -- Doug
I'm sure you have a M$ machine so you can open and enjoy all the PowerPoint crap your friends e-mail you. -- Eliz
Heh. :-) I knew you'd understand. The comment was aimed at forestalling the world at large from launching predictable jabs. ;-) -- Doug
I GaveUpOnEmail? a few years ago. That way I don't have to tell people not to send me Word .doc files, PowerPoint files, Visio files, and everything else I don't want to look at even if my machine were capable of displaying it. -- Eliz
But back to the bug at hand... There's a lot of mention in the WikiWikiBugs of poorly formed or invalid HTML, and Costin brings up poor HTML above. The IE6 problem might be side-stepped if Ward's HTML were to include a <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> tag. But I don't know what charset would suit all the wiki pages. As you can see in InternationalOneMinuteWiki, there's sometimes a need for non-Western characters. Or, instead of inserting a meta tag in the HTML, Ward could tell his server to specify a charset in the http header (as opposed to the HTML head). -- ElizabethWiethoff
"still" means in AugustZeroFive. Is this page cooked, yet?
Just maybe the problem can be made to reoccur (and then reported to Microsoft). If not, then it would be best to just clean up, leaving a warning somewhere to those using various character encoding settings with MSIE that they might encounter this bug.
I think the only way I'll be able to make the problem reoccur is to sit down at my friend's machine a few nights from now and see if I can remove some entries from the charset shortlist in the registry. Then the task is to fix the problem again and clean up this page. -- ElizabethWiethoff
You might well be able to reproduce the failing situation on your friend's machine by restoring the registry to the restore point that Spybot S&D automatically created when you ran it.
I don't see any hurry; there's a still-unresolved issue, and as long as you are interested in looking into it, I see no reason to rush to throw away this page. Seems to me there's no problem with retaining it as long as you are still investigating, with or without help. -- DougMerritt
It might be worth renaming it and converting it to expository mode, from thread mode. That way it might be helpful to someone having a similar problem.
I came across this page after searching Google because I was seeing bogus UTF-7 detection by Internet Explorer 6.0 (6.0.3790.3959) with all updates installed, in January 2008. I had a page that listed international phone numbers (eg. +44701234567 in the UK) and they were treated as Chinese and other Unicode characters. If I manually set the character set in IE (View / Encoding / Western European (ISO)) to the value returned in the headers of the website, everything worked fine. This Microsoft bug appears to raise its head again and again.
- JoeWein?
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