Can't Edit Messages

Did something in the forum system change? I am no longer able to edit some of my messages.

I regularly maintain my clothing reviews thread without making new posts and really need the ability to make edits to keep the info accurate and up to date.

Afaik, there's no intentional lock on editing comments.

I had the same issue before and managed to eventually edit the comment by rewriting it bit by bit.

In that regard it feels very related to the usual "Internal Server Error".

I've never gotten past the 'can no longer be edited' error. Iirc even if you replaced the entire post with a single retyped word, you wouldn't be able to edit it. The other error can be fixed by finding the offending piece of text and retyping it. 

17 minutes ago, BeyondTime said:

I've never gotten past the 'can no longer be edited' error.

Hmm...

I had this one on a random post. - And eventually managed to get around it.

I think i first started by checking if the post saved without making any actual edits, then swapping out text line by line, trying to see if it gets accepted.

I can't even get it to save even with no edits. 

Edited August 17, 2022 by chef_mai

4 hours ago, chef_mai said:

I can't even get it to save even with no edits. 

If you want to make a new post with your changes, you can report the old one for deletion. We can't reorder the posts, so your new one would be at the end of the thread. If nothing changed about the post I suspect you would end up with the same issue in the new post. These issues seem to be content in the post that triggers an error in the forum software. 

I'd bet it's cause the original post is too long - I had that problem once and splitting my original wall of text into 3 posts fixed it. Not ideal, but it DID work. I wouldn't be surprised if the forum backend had an update that changed the max post length on us without telling us.

You could try cutting it and including a link at the bottom that leads to the continuation post - if you hit the little "share" icon on a post it will provide you a handy link!

51 minutes ago, Oculae said:

I'd bet it's cause the original post is too long

We have far longer posts out there. The issues seem to stem from contents in the posts that the forum software doesn't like. It prevents the system from writing to the database in some cases, or changing what's in the database in others. 

8 hours ago, BeyondTime said:

If you want to make a new post with your changes, you can report the old one for deletion. We can't reorder the posts, so your new one would be at the end of the thread. If nothing changed about the post I suspect you would end up with the same issue in the new post. These issues seem to be content in the post that triggers an error in the forum software. 

I ended up tacking a second post right after the original, so I'll leave it like that for now. If the issue crops up again on a different post, I'll let you know.

14 minutes ago, chef_mai said:

I ended up tacking a second post right after the original, so I'll leave it like that for now.

I merged the two posts. I’m curious if you can edit now?

5 minutes ago, BeyondTime said:

I merged the two posts. I’m curious if you can edit now?

Unfortunately, it's still denying the edit.

1 hour ago, chef_mai said:

Unfortunately, it's still denying the edit.

Darn, I was hoping it would overwrite the bad element in the database. 

I redid the offending part but couldn't figure out what the bad character was. It went away if I removed a line break between 2 paragraphs, but no matter what I tried to do to reinstate the line break, it'd still complain until I removed some innocuous text (just letters, no punctuation) in the first paragraph.

That really sounds like a character limit is being triggered somewhere on the back end, which would be in line with my experience with the bug. That's what I meant about "posts being too long" earlier. If this was a recent change to the back end, we could totally have lots of posts that are longer than what's currently allowed by the forum's back end, they would just run into this bug if you tried to edit them to do anything but make them short enough to fit this secret new parameter. It's weird that it sounds like a line break counts as multiple characters if that's what's happening, though!

...Forgive me, I keep wanting to put my QA tester hat on from work. 😆 The urge to make a junk topic just for testing scenarios with Lipsum of various lengths is so strong, but it would definitely just be spam and is not my job anyway. Even if I really really really wanna know what this bug is. Must....resist!