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Where Knowledge Junkies Get Their Fix
We’ve been getting emails about a strange quirk that—I think—is exclusive to Apple’s Safari browser. The senseless inclusion of the words “_LongTerm_” (see screenshot above) is making our site difficult to stomach. We’ve been trying to fix this, but coming up short. Any armchair IT professionals have any insight?
And is anyone seeing this in a different browser?
Comments (23)
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I saw it using Internet Explorer.
posted by Tricia on 10-1-2008 at 10:58 am
Firefox user here; I’ve never seen this problem in my browser. I tried it out in IE 7 and didn’t see it there either.
posted by Craig on 10-1-2008 at 11:05 am
Can you give us a bit more information on where it appears? It looks like it’s probably a javascript problem – maybe related to those annoying “ContentLink” advertisements?
posted by -@^@- on 10-1-2008 at 11:16 am
I saw it a few times about a week ago and once I updated to the newer version of Safari it seemed fix.
I am using Version 3.1.2 (4525.22), and I believe it’s the latest fix through Software Update in the drop down from the Apple.
posted by KP on 10-1-2008 at 11:18 am
I am an IT Professional. I did a little bit of quick research on it. It is not just Safari, it is any browser on certain Macs. It is replacing links, and certain text surrounded by semi-colons, etc.
So far I have not found a solution on the IT message boards (most IT people do not specialize in Macs, probably because they usually don’t need to be fixed), but I will keep an eye out.
posted by Witty Nickname on 10-1-2008 at 11:21 am
If you google for __LongTerm__ you’ll actually find tons of people complaining about this problem, and a bunch of forum posts where people have quoted another user’s post and ended up with random __LongTerm__’s everywhere. Weird stuff, but given how a seemingly random assortment of other sites are affected (doesn’t look like any common software or tool, at least on the surface), I’m not sure how easily you can fix it. Might just be a bug in Safari, strange.
posted by Eric on 10-1-2008 at 11:47 am
Using Safari here Version 3.1.2 (5525.20.1), and I’m not seeing it. Kind of a crazy thing though. Hope you get it sorted out. Kudos for the use of the Caroll O’Connor photo — he’s one of my favourite actors!
recaptcha: ex- Eyebright
posted by Lidiu on 10-1-2008 at 11:57 am
Not seeing it in Chrome or Firefox, but getting a weird WordPress database error. Something about can’t connect to MySQL database. Or maybe that’s just a problem on my end?
reCaptcha: guilt vastly
posted by Amy D on 10-1-2008 at 12:07 pm
Thanks for all the tips. I’ll pass this along to people much smarter than me and see what they make of it.
Amy D — The MySQL error is unrelated (but even more bothersome). We’ve got a story on the CNN homepage right now with a bunch of links back here, and that’s slowing things down.
cnn.com/2008/LIVING/wayoflife/10/01/mf.easy.money/index.html
posted by Jason English on 10-1-2008 at 12:17 pm
I am a PC and I am a student.
sorry… had to.
posted by Amy on 10-1-2008 at 12:49 pm
I see it using IE 7.0 5730 11
posted by Frank on 10-1-2008 at 1:51 pm
I have never had that problem using Safari. I even went back and went on a mad bender last night reading tons of mental_floss posts. It did happen to me once when I was reloading waiting for last months HDYK challenge.
posted by Scott on 10-1-2008 at 2:41 pm
Thanks for the Safari update idea – that seemed to solve it. So simple too… I should really stop ignoring the Software Update popup on my mac…
posted by Colin GG on 10-1-2008 at 2:42 pm
Sorry that should have said month’s. And I was using IE.
posted by Scott on 10-1-2008 at 2:43 pm
Could be a language issue on the webserver. This is why you sometimes get question marks instead of apostrophes, etc. Make sure that the language that the webserver is on is set. The next problem would be in how the textual data was stored for the post. If someone copy and pasted from something like MS Word, sometimes the apostrophes, and other special characters get copied directly, as opposed to in a plain text format. That is where I would start.
To track it down, you could put in javascript on a page that scans the innerHTML of the entire document. if the LongTerm word is found, capture the innerhtml of the area, plus the persons web browser info and operating system so you can try and recreate the issue.
posted by Scott on 10-1-2008 at 2:56 pm
I haven’t seen any such thing in Firefox, versions 2.6 or 3.0, on a PC.
posted by M on 10-1-2008 at 5:00 pm
I’m on a real old Safari (1.3.2) and everything seems fine.
posted by ramon on 10-1-2008 at 6:23 pm
I use Safari, 3.1.2, and I don’t see “_LongTerm_”.
posted by Emily S S on 10-1-2008 at 8:08 pm
On a Mac, Long Term was replacing ONLY words with apostrophes (and was replacing ALL words with apostrophes) in Safari, but not in Firefox. I just upgraded to the current Safari version and the problem disappeared.
posted by 0ldB4t on 10-2-2008 at 4:53 am
Yes I’m seeing it and I’m using Opera.
posted by Michigan Mom on 10-2-2008 at 5:46 am
Upgraded to Safari 3.1.2 last night and no more _LongTerm_ It was driving me crazy!
posted by A2Veeness on 10-2-2008 at 6:11 am
I see it when using Safari or NetNewsWire on both my Macbook running OS 10.4.11 and my iPod touch which is fully updated. Hopefully updating Safari will work on my Macbook but it looks like I’ll have to wait until the next update for my iPod touch. Sad day.
posted by Amanda on 10-2-2008 at 12:16 pm
I beleive this is caused by a buggy javascript.
Viewing the sorce HTML does not show any __LongTerm__ and the original text is all there.
I am using Firefox. When I encountered pages that shows __LongTerm__, I tried disabling Javascript in Firefox and reload the page and the original text came back.
I noticed in the sorce HTML page that all of the pages that show __LongTerm__ are using javascript from kontera.com which is an ad provider site.
posted by KNP on 10-12-2008 at 10:37 am