Posts with coordinates or board size in game chat truncated

I am losing text from my posts in game chat as displayed in Firefox when they include coordinates. When I view the same game in the app Sente, I see the complete text. It seems that text other than coordinates is omitted after the first point named. I have observed this in the HTML.

In this game I wrote

Testing again: If you play E 3 after I connect at F 1, that forces me to fill 1 point of territory.

and that appears correctly. I then wrote

Testing again: If you play E3 after I connect at F1, that forces me to fill 1 point of territory.

which appears in the chat as

Testing again: If you play E3 F1

but when I copied that from the chat and pasted it here, it appeared as

Testing again: If you playE3F1

Since I had never noticed such a thing on my laptop, I thought it might by due to my (Android / Fairphone 4) smartphone, or even a strange side-effect of having installed the Sente app, but it seems to happen when I chat in Firefox, regardless of whether I am on my laptop or my phone.

But now I have looked at the chat in Sente, and see that the chat appears correctly. That suggests to me one of 2 things:

  • OGS formats chat differently, and wrongly, for the browser.
  • There are strange control characters confusing Firefox.

Looking at in the the HTML inspector I see:
<span class="body"> : <span>Testing again: If you play</span> <span class="position">E3</span> <span class="position">F1</span> </span>
— so it looks as though it is wrongly formatted for the browser!

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It’s a different specific parsing issue, but I’m encountering a similar case of chat appearing fine in a third-party app (my own Tenuki) but number or board size parsing seems to be screwing up the official client.

I wonder if something broke the chat tokenizer/link extractor recently.


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I see this issue as well. Only the coordinates in the message get displayed in the Chat. I found a way around it by adding parenthesis and space. This chat for example:

I had also had an issue of including “19x19” in a message. The whole text gets reduced to only “x19”. But I found a way around it by adding space around the “x”. For example this chat:

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FWIW, experimenting with a test game in the beta server in chrome, safari, and firefox on my mac, both with the https://beta.online-go.com frontent and a locally-served copy of the frontend, I can consistently reproduce the issue with board sizes (typing “9x9” truncates the message to only read “x9”, while typing “9” or “9x” in context of another message is fine), but could not reproduce the initial coordinate issue. lazerwalker-test-2 vs. lazerwalker-test for context.

Opened a GH issue for the board size issue: When a chat message contains a "NxN" board size string, the entire message is truncated to just be "xN" · Issue #3381 · online-go/online-go.com · GitHub

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FYI, when I open the link from your post, your chats get mauled for me too. Also a Firefox user.

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I’m curious if you’re getting the coordinate issue or just the board dimension issue!

@marinakai Today I opened the link again, and the problem seems to be gone. Chats show correctly, both those containing things like “A9” and those containing things like “9x9”. I know that yesterday those containing “A9” were broken, but I don’t remember — actually I didn’t check yesterday — if “9x9” was also broken.

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Same for me. I just checked the game I mentioned in my OP, and the coordinates are fine. Just one surprise:


“F1” is not highlighted and does not function as to highlight that spot on the board.

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