For the love of God: ED, **Please** remove 'smart' filters from ED's userfile submissions

[cfrag]

If you have ever submitted a mission to ED's use files, you may have seen this happen to your mission as well:

After you have lovingly crafted a mission and decided to share it with the community, you head over to ED's user files section, and create a new submission. To submit your mission, you are required to fill out a form (which, let's be honest, asks a number of rather silly questions that the submission code could gather itself it it was written by some competent author). 

You go ahead and enter your mission's description and summary - some free text that I'm sure most of us also craft carefully. We enter the text, and then, after dotting the "i" and crossing all "t", we submit the mission.

What the average mission contributor doesn't know is that while submitting your mission, the submission script runs a check on the free text that the author submitted as mission description. That check is not aimed at making the description look better. No, in a lame, last millennium attempt at curbing code injection, it rips apart some key words. So if your mission description contains words like "until" or "from" (and some others), they have a blank inserted: "from" becomes "fr om" etc. It makes the contributor look stupid, and worse, it makes them appear careless and incompetent. While the threat posed by code injection is real, I do believe that ED has the chops to mitigate it in a more apt, and less intrusive manner than the 1992 sledgehammer approach we see today.

I know it's a small thing, but I find it highly frustrating to first write something to share with the community, only to have it so callously and incompetently vandalized by last century's functionality.

Thank you.

Edited June 8, 2024 by cfrag

[Squiggs]

So you are saying it doesn't let you sel ect the words you want just in ca se you cre ate something that it does n ot li ke what is i n there

Edited June 8, 2024 by Squiggs

[draconus]

On 6/8/2024 at 1:14 PM, cfrag said:

So if your mission description contains words like "until" or "from" (and some others), they have a blank inserted: "from" becomes "fr om" etc.

Can you edit it after? Did you make sure it's not your software, browser or add on?

[cfrag]

Unfortunately, I see no reaction from ED, which I find disappointing, and it makes me question why this entire forum chapter exists. @NineLine - is anyone from ED monitoring this? I see far too few (if any) tags from you and your kind colleagues, and I am wondering if there might be a better way to spend my time than posting here. My understanding is that we (customers) post here to help you (ED) to make a good product even better. I hope that your views are somewhat aligned with mine.

In any event, here's some copy from a very nice and helpful submission from a fellow contributor, who I am absolutely sure did not include the blanks, and had the silly ED bot mangle their thoughtful contribution:

To begin using the DCS Mod Manager, you'll first need to sel ect the main directory where your DCS mods are stored. This is usually located at:
[...]
Reload: Refresh the list of mods fr om the selected directory. Use this if you've added or removed mods manually and want to update the list.


Please, please, please turn this silly feature off.

[draconus]

25 minutes ago, cfrag said:

Unfortunately, I see no reaction from ED, which I find disappointing, and it makes me question why this entire forum chapter exists.

Sorry to hear your favorite wish has not beed granted yet but you know it's not how it works - though many of the wishes were actually granted and the forum section works fine. If you feel it's a bug it should've been posted elsewhere as a bug report. But I see you didn't even care to answer my questions from 2 months ago.

Example: https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/filter/type-is-campaign/apply/?PER_PAGE=100

The search reveals 19 "from" words and not a single "fr om". The same situation on every next page. Looks like it's not as common as you might think and maybe the problem lays elsewhere.

Edited September 9, 2024 by draconus