SMF Support > vBulletin
[SMF Converter] vBulletin 3.5
Red G. Brown:
I figured out what's wrong. SMF isn't converting HTML reserved characters into HTML entities. In other words, a line like this:
<nickname> Hi
is displayed by the forum verbatim, and the web browser will render it like this:
Hi
The forum needs to convert the HTML reserved characters < and > into HTML entities that will be displayed by the browser. Right now, browsers are treating <nickname> as an unknown HTML tag and not displaying it. SMF needs to convert them according to this:
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_entities.asp
I noticed that the problem doesn't appear in THIS forum, so I checked my freshly installed forum for some option to turn off HTML in posts, and I found "Enable basic HTML in posts", which is already off by default.
The "tags" are in the forum page source, so the pages will no longer validate. It looks like an easy problem to fix, even though it's quite serious.
N. N.:
Actually, SMF is converting html entities, in every posts, PMs, etc, made using SMF.
However it remains to be seen what the post looked like in the former database, and what it looks like after conversion, the raw database data, that is.
I'll test myself too, to see, as soon as possible.
Red G. Brown:
Database before conversion:
[23:21] <nickname> hey...\r\n
Database after conversion:
[23:21] <nickname> hey...\r\n
Source code of the forum webpage:
[23:21] <nickname> hey...<br />
It's that source code part that's the problem. It should be:
[23:21] <nickname> hey...<br />
UPDATE:
I just found that in the forum title section, if I do
<a href='websitemainpage.com'>Website Title</a>
It will put that string into a meta tag without escaping the < and > with < and > just as before, which will cause the page to not validate. I'm curious what it would do if the URL had an ampersand in it, like many URLs do. They all have to be escaped with & to keep the site valid, even when they're in URLs.
UPDATE:
I just tried putting & in a forum title, and the board converts it to & fine. It looks like the way SMF handles that issue is inconsistent. It ought check everything, but it looks as though some things are checked and fixed, and some aren't.
UPDATE:
I found this post
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=306815.0
If I understand it correctly, it seems that this might be a pervasive bug in SMF, and it's not related exclusively to conversions from other software.
Red G. Brown:
I found another bug, but I don't know if it's related to conversion or not. My VB forum used BB code, but I tried to have BB code turned off in my new SMF forum. When it's completely off, paragraph formatting isn't obeyed in displaying the posts. If I "modify" the post, I can see clearly that the formatting is still there, just not being displayed properly. If I then save the "modification" without actually changing anything, it fixes it. If I turn just one BB code item on, that fixes it too. Is this a bug in SMF as a whole, or just in the conversion?
Red G. Brown:
I've found another problem. Even in post text, reserved HTML characters are not being converted to HTML entities. For example, someone saying in their post " 5 > 4" will cause a validation error on the page. Here's an example:
http://www.livebusinesschat.com/smf/index.php/topic,85.0.html
Is this a problem with an SMF bug, or is it a problem with the conversion?
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version