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"Replied to" comments content displayed with broken layout (vertical/horizontal)

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Status
Open
Subject
"Replied to" comments content displayed with broken layout (vertical/horizontal)
Version
27.x
Category
  • Regression
Feature
Comment
Resolution status
Fix on the Way
Submitted by
Marc Laporte
Lastmod by
Philippe Cloutier
Rating
(0)
Description

Tiki 25 introduced an optional limit on comment indentation, so that replies to comments of level 5 or above are not more indented than their parents (for example, a reply to a reply to a reply to a reply to a reply to a reply to a root comment would only have 5 levels of indentation). In order to keep indicating threading (which is a comment's parent) even in these comments which reach the indentation limit, an excerpt of that parent's text was added.

Although the initial implementation was incorrect, it got much worse in Tiki 27. While the excerpt used to be the first 15 characters of the markup (source), it has now become the first 15 characters of the output (HTML) (reportedly to fix a bug for Markdown).

Unfortunately, such a truncation is completely unsafe, and visibly breaks most of the time (although this may depend on the paragraph parsing preferences). Although this can cause all sorts of broken HTML and resulting weirdness, the typical effect is that truncation happens inside a paragraph, leaving a missing </p> tag, which causes browsers to ignore the closing </span> tag, effectively treating the reply itself as a part of the parent comment since the DOM's span contains too much.


Moreover, in November there was a puzzling attempt to fix this which moved the problem, making this way worse for Tiki 27.1. Now, instead of just breaking rare (highly nested) replies:

  • level 1 comments display an irrelevant excerpt
  • level 1 comments are therefore frequently broken
  • level 5+ comments are missing an excerpt (but are therefore no longer badly broken).


Screenshot taken from https://dev.tiki.org/item7838-Installer-not-ready-for-PHP-7-4-in-Tiki-18-x

Files
  1. 2024 10 13 122416
Solution

Multiple solutions are possible:

  1. Stop truncating the excerpt
  2. Go back to displaying the markup instead of parsing
  3. Truncating the output in a much more smart and involved way (done for 27.2 by amani nyumu)
  4. Stop displaying the excerpt
    1. Indicate the parent without resorting to an except. There is already some work done for that (the parent's author is indicated). Adding a timestamp would be good, and a link too would make it clearly sufficient.
    2. Find some other way to represent unlimited depth (which does not rely on a hard limit)
Workaround
The excerpt can be removed by commenting the 5 problematic lines (if/span at 26 to 30) in the problematic file, templates/comment/list_inner.tpl.
Importance
7
Easy to solve?
7
Priority
49
Demonstrate Bug on Tiki 19+
Demonstrate Bug (older Tiki versions)
Ticket ID
8714
Created
Sunday 13 October, 2024 16:24:56 UTC
by Marc Laporte
LastModif
Wednesday 22 January, 2025 02:28:44 UTC


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