Duplication of text whenever I navigate away from the page
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I’m experiencing really bizarre behaviour in the code editor. Whenever I navigate away from the page, the editor duplicates huge quantities of the text, sometimes deleting chunks of it, other times just regurgitating the entire page. This doesn’t seem to be happening in the visual editor, but I’d like to get at the code.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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I don’t know if this is related, by WordPress has now completely lost all my drafts, which is, to put it mildly, a bit of a problem for me.
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I don’t see the problem you are having on your site http://frankpodmore.wordpress.com/. Can you give us the link of a post or page?
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Hi staartmees. It’s not a post that I’d published yet, it was a draft. It’s now disappeared, so I can’t send you any kind of link.
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I’m a member of Staff so I’m able to see the backend of your site.
I do see in the regular dashboard view that you have “14 drafts” but it also shows nothing in that list.
Switching to the wp-admin view, they appear to be there:
https://frankpodmore.wordpress.com/wp-admin/edit.php?post_status=draft&post_type=post
Can you confirm all your drafts are still there?
Regarding the code editor, can you let us know which draft is causing you trouble? We’ll be able to take a look to see what might be happening here.
Thanks!
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Hi csonnek,
Okay, thanks. In the admin view I can see the titles of the drafts, which is an improvement. When I click on the drafts, I get a blank white screen.
The particular issue with the code editor was on this page: https://frankpodmore.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=3693&action=edit
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Hi! We’ve been taking a look at this, and I think we’ll need to get a closer look still.
– Can you help us understand why you were in the code editor? Not that it’s a bad thing, but maybe it can help us understand how to duplicate this.
– Would it be alright if we help you get the text copied into a fresh draft so you can continue? We would need to tinker with the broken one as well, if that’s okay. We wouldn’t publish it.
– Regarding the https://wordpress.com/drafts/frankpodmore.wordpress.com page, would you be willing to create a draft on one of your other sites to confirm whether drafts are broken there as well, or whether it’s just on this one site?
Thanks in advance.
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Hi supernovia,
– I was finetuning the punctuation, replacing straight quotes with smart quotes, hyphens with en-dashes, etc.
– Yes, that sounds fine.
– I’ve tried this, they also have the identical issue: the editor screen doesn’t load properly.
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Hello there,
Ok thank for you for that information there. I was able to access the content via the Classic Editor, and I can see quite a bit of HTML there.
I was then able to strip out the HTML and place this into this test post here: https://frankpodmore.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=3705&action=edit whereby it does load.
I suspect something was perhaps removed, inadvertently whereby it shouldn’t have been – does that sound likely?
Many thanks.
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Hi aleone89,
That’s looking better, in that I can access the test post and the original post via the admin, but it’s still lost a large amount of the work I did, which I saved as I went along. I assume this is now gone forever?
There’s also the matter of the duplication that I originally mentioned: the whole blog post is just the same 4 or 5 paragraphs repeating over and over.
Also, when I go to https://wordpress.com/posts/drafts/frankpodmore.wordpress.com, I still can’t see any of my drafts. The Drafts tab says there are 15 posts but in the window below it says No Posts Found, even though they are clearly all there and accessible if I go via the wp-admin and use the classic editor.
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Hi there,
That’s looking better, in that I can access the test post and the original post via the admin, but it’s still lost a large amount of the work I did, which I saved as I went along. I assume this is now gone forever?
I’ve checked the revision history of the post, and did not see any content in there, so I do not see another way that we could recover anything that is missing.
There’s also the matter of the duplication that I originally mentioned: the whole blog post is just the same 4 or 5 paragraphs repeating over and over.
That is what I see as well, many many times over, so that there is now about 25,000 words in the blog post. For reference that is 30% of the length of an average novel. Clearly something has gone very wrong here. :(
To confirm this is the only time you have had this issue, and this is the only post that is affected?
Also, when I go to https://wordpress.com/posts/drafts/frankpodmore.wordpress.com, I still can’t see any of my drafts. The Drafts tab says there are 15 posts but in the window below it says No Posts Found, even though they are clearly all there and accessible if I go via the wp-admin and use the classic editor.
You can see them if you visit the draft post view in wp-admin yes? I am able to see them when I look at this link that another staff member shared recently: https://frankpodmore.wordpress.com/wp-admin/edit.php?post_status=draft&post_type=post
After chatting with our engineers it seems that the central issue here is the amount of content in that blog post is causing the WordPress.com web app to have issues. It is not able to display the draft post list (as well as the page editor view) due to the way it is struggling to display all that text and code, though you should see it in the wp-admin view I linked above.
If you wish we can delete the post or reduce it to the original 4-5 paragraphs so that it loads correctly (in case you are still unable to do so) but we don’t see a way to recover any lost content I’m afraid.
I was finetuning the punctuation, replacing straight quotes with smart quotes, hyphens with en-dashes, etc.
It seems likely that this may be where the issue started from, only because it’s not typical to edit the raw code of the block editor. It’s a feature that is intended for developers and others folks familiar with the Gutenberg code that runs the editor. The problem with punctuation is that code also can use punctuation, and I can see a situation existing where a change you might make to the text is interpreted incorrectly by the editor and causes the code to act up.
If you can think back, do you recall the edit(s) you were making right before the issue of the duplicated text coming up? You mentioned “navigating away from the page” which it sounds like is something you do periodically when touching up your text like this? Can you tell us a bit more about that? You are switching back and forth from visual to code views?
Thanks for the additional info!
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Just noting too:
I was finetuning the punctuation, replacing straight quotes with smart quotes, hyphens with en-dashes, etc.
WordPress should be handling this automatically. It won’t appear in the editor that way, but when you view the post, it should have the nicer punctuation. You can see a guide for what gets converted here:
Is that not happening for you?
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staff-totoro
Yes, this is the only time I’ve had the issue, and just with this post. When I moved away from the tab with the blog, I was moving to other tabs, e.g., to copy-paste links or other text from another page into my blogpost. Is it possible that something I copied and pasted caused an issue on my page? I wasn’t copying over code, just text and URLs.
In terms of the editor, I stayed in the code view the whole time. I’ve been using WordPress personally and professionally for years, so I’m just used to using the code view and haven’t ever really bothered with the visual editors (either classic or new). Never had this issue before! Generally I just use HTML because I know that way I can get things looking exactly how I want.
I have a local back-up of some of the blog (I copied it into a notepad when I first noticed the issue), so I’m happy for you to delete the post that was causing the issue.
Possibly the punctuation thing is a function of the new visual editor? As I said above, I’ve never used it much, always just relied on HTML to fix things.
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Hello there,
Is it possible that something I copied and pasted caused an issue on my page?
It’s totally possible. What were you copying from exactly?
I have a local back-up of some of the blog (I copied it into a notepad when I first noticed the issue), so I’m happy for you to delete the post that was causing the issue.
No problem, this has been done. I deleted 16 Bars for the Bits, by Kayo Chingonyi to confirm, along with the test post as this was a duplicate of the content.
When deleting, I noticed this code:
<span data-mce-type="bookmark" style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span>Are you able to tell us what that is please? I suspect it may have been carried over when copying perhaps.
Are you able to confirm you’re able to see your drafts as usual please?
Many thanks :)
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IIRC, I only copied some stuff from this page:
Specifically, I think it was the URL and this text:
There is some rap prosody in A Blood Condition. ‘16 Bars for the Bits’, for example — a 16 bar is a rap verse form. I’m thinking about that a lot more in my writing now: the form of rap is a little bit looser, more conversational and more direct, maybe
I’ve no idea what the code in the span tags is! Not something I wrote, so it is possible that’s what snuck in from somewhere and caused the issue. I can’t see that code or anything like it on the page I think I was on, though, so I’m none the wiser as to how it got in there.
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Hello there,
Hm, very strange indeed – it may very well have snuck in there, but at least it we know for sure there was something in there that shouldn’t have been. :)
Are you using any ad blockers or anything of that ilk?
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Yeah, I have Privacy Badger and NoScript, but I have them set to switch off when I’m using WordPress.
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Interesting – these types of extensions are notorious for interfering with how WordPress.com operates and their caches can linger slightly (depending on the extensions), which means it could have an impact even when deactivated.
I suspect these are the root cause of the woes faced here. :)
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