I think I thought of something. When you've got an opening bracket, start scanning the rest of the post. You're looking for a quote of some sort or an opening or closing bracket. If you get to an opening bracket, that's an error. If you get to a quote, then just look for another of those quotes, and ignore everything else you come across until you find it. Then start looking for any quote or bracket again. If you find a closing bracket, you're done. If you get to the end of the post while you're still looking for anything, that's an error. If there's an error, bring up an edit page that just has the text box at the bottom, no post at the top, and tell the poster to fix it before posting. Would that work? (Does that even make any sense, or do I need to find some better way of explaining it?)

The edit link *did* work, Jon. It's that the edit form was broken by the bad HTML.

Ahhh, got it. I just tried to edit it and I see what you mean. The problem is that the opening FORM tag appears after the broken post. In this case, the FORM tag appeared before a second ' (single quote) which caused it to become a part of the messed-up "a href" tag.

There's an easy fix to make sure this particular mess doesn't happen again --- move the opening FORM tag so that it appears before the post. I just tried it and it worked great. Would you like me to put this revised version in test? None of my other mods use editpost.php so this would be completely independent of those.

Also, put me in the "we should disallow table tags" column. ita - like Noumenon said, you could always post your nifty table-ized statistics somewhere else and link to them.

Also, put me in the "we should disallow table tags" column.

But without table tags, there wouldn't be any columns...!

ita - like Noumenon said, you could always post your nifty table-ized statistics somewhere else and link to them.

Yeah, but no. I'm not using someone else's server space for that. They'll just have to be not posted.

Please fix editpost, Jon, and deletepost too.

Please fix editpost, Jon, and deletepost too.

Done.

I'm not using someone else's server space for that.

Don't you have your own server space?

Don't you have your own server space?

Yup, but I want my posts to have the same lifetime as the board, not as some other site -- I've already accumulated directories full of stuff I think I put there to link to from somewhere else, and it's messy.

As I said, I'll just stop.

For the record, there are 23 posts that use a table tag -- half of those are mine, the rest posted by Jess, Jon, John, billytea and Dani.

I don't think we should outlaw table tags.

The problems that have been caused have all been genuine errors, and the people who made them have presumably been informed, and learned from their mistake?

But in each case, wasn't it a typo rather than an error? I mean, people know what to do, they just mis-type sometimes. If that mis-typing is going to cause a huge problem, we're better off doing something about it, I think.

Mine was pasting part of something tabley into the board, which got confused by the missing parts.

Three of John H's tables are 10-cell tables like the one in John H "Natter 3: My Life and Times of Me, as Seen by Me" Oct 27, 2002 12:23:29 am EDT. So he won't miss those, except in a techy way.

For the record, there are 23 posts that use a table tag -- half of those are mine, the rest posted by Jess, Jon, John, billytea and Dani.

The times I used a table, I could have easily done without.