# [b], [s]...



## Dymn

It annoys me how after (see above) the text appears in bold and underlined, respectively, in phonological issues. How can I avoid it? Is there any chance you can change it?

Thank you.


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## mkellogg

Hi. Can you please explain? I'm not understanding.


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## Peterdg

Yes. You can surround them with [PLAIN]  and   [/PLAIN]

This is what you would get without the "PLAIN"s:

This is *a sentence. *

and this is what I typed:

This is  [b]  a sentence.

This is with the "PLAIN"'s:

This is  [b] a sentence 

and this is what I had to enter to obtain the above sentence:

This is  [PLAIN]   [b]    [/PLAIN] a sentence.


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## Drake15

mkellogg said:


> Hi. Can you please explain? I'm not understanding.


If you want to write phonetic symbols between brackets ([b] and [s] in this case), the forum interprets them as opening BBCode tags and makes all the following text bold or crosses it out. I asumme that also happens with [i].

Like Peterdg said, @Diamant7, you can surround them with [plain] tags, like this, and problem solved:
[code][plain][b][/plain][/code]

!


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## Dymn

OK. Thank you both!


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## entangledbank

Or simply add a space on either side: both [b ] and [ b] show up as intended, without converting the following text to bold.


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## elroy

entangledbank said:


> Or simply add a space on either side: both [b ] and [ b] show up as intended, without converting the following text to bold.


 To me that's unsightly.  I prefer the [PLAIN] solution.


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## Red Arrow

You can also use  [noparse] and [/noparse].

For instance:
 [i] [b] 

You can quote my post to see what I did


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## Loob

Red Arrow said:


> You can also use  [noparse] and [/noparse].


Intriguingly, the BBcodes advice section says not to use _noparse_:
[NOPARSE] - No Parse​DO NOT USE. Use [plain] instead. Prevents parsing of BBcode inside the tags.​
I don't know why.


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## elroy

Intriguing, indeed!  I wonder why that would be discouraged.


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## Peterdg

elroy said:


> Intriguing, indeed!  I wonder why that would be discouraged.


They usually say that when they are planning to remove that option in a next release or they will stop maintaining it.


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## mkellogg

I just checked. [NOPARSE] was the code in the vBulletin days. Xenforo's equivalent is [plain].

They both work and probably will continue to work. Someday, I might replace all of the NOPARSE codes in the old threads with PLAIN, but it makes little sense to do that.


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## Ghabi

Erroneous bold, italic, strikethrough etc (after software upgrades)

This is a problem that has existed for quite some years, if I remember correctly, and I think many of us are aware of it. Doesn't seem that we have an easy way to solve it, but I just want to add an example here for future reference purposes.

For example, the following is a post from the Indo-Iranian Languages forum:


souminwé said:


> [ɨ] is the sound in ros*e*s (in most accents of English). It's a centralised _, and is only slightly more central and closed than [ɪ].
> It's merely allophonic in English, but it occupies a more distinguished position in Russian. You can hear the sound in the audio clip of the Russian word *быть* (byt’) (underlined vowel corresponds to [ɨ]):_
> _http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/быть#Russian_



As far as I can tell, the original post should have read (before one of the software upgrades):


souminwé said:


> [ɨ] is the sound in ros*e*s (in most accents of English). It's a centralised [i], and is only slightly more central and closed than [ɪ].
> It's merely allophonic in English, but it occupies a more distinguished position in Russian. You can hear the sound in the audio clip of the Russian word *быть* (b_y_t’) (underlined vowel corresponds to [ɨ]):
> http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/быть#Russian



The existence of [i] has caused the unintentional italicised part, and [i] itself has disappeared from the post (being interpreted as a tag), which can cause confusion. (The [i] has also the side-effect of causing any post quoting that post to become italicised.)

[b], [s], [h] etc cause similar problems, as many of us are aware.

We really can't avoid writing [i] etc, as this is a language forum where the discussion of sounds is inevitable. On the other hand, the problem has persisted after several forum upgrades.

While many users have now learnt to use [plain][i][/plain] etc when creating new posts to avoid the faulty interpretation on the part of the software, the "warped" old posts can only be corrected manually.


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## mkellogg

Ghabi said:


> the "warped" old posts can only be corrected manually.


Are you sure that older software correctly showed the [i]? I can see where it had the logic of "if there is no end tag of [/i], then print it as it is instead of italicizing to the end". I suspect that the old software didn't have this logic in the code and so the posts never showed correctly from the beginning.

What we can do:
I can search for posts that have [i] but not a closing [/i]. We could review a sample of them and if it makes sense, I can update the posts by putting a [plain][i][/plain] tag around it.


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## Ghabi

mkellogg said:


> Are you sure that older software correctly showed the [i]?


Far as I remember, the problem arose only after one of the software upgrades, and people would probably have raised a red flag if the glitch were present at the very beginning. (I've not been here really long enough to remember really old things of course, so you may need to consult even older members.)

Also, the effects of some tags are really jarring, so people would surely have noticed, for example the following post from EHL posted in 2007:


jmx said:


> The word "strong" here is completely misguiding. The 's' letter in Spanish corresponds to a sibilant sound. There is a regional variation where this sibilant is "aspirated", which can mean pronouncing it as , not pronouncing anything, and some more possibilities. This variation is very widespread, as you have noticed, but it is still regional. In the northern half of Spain, in much of Mexico, in many South America highlands, any 's' is simply an [s].


Here [h] is the culprit. I doubt that mods and users would have missed that if it were shown this way then.


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## Awwal12

If there's only one "problematic" letter in the message, I usually use the quickest method: [b[b][/b]], [i[b][/b]] and so on. Meaning that opening and closing any tag inside the brackets does the job.


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## entangledbank

mkellogg said:


> What we can do:
> I can search for posts that have [i] but not a closing [/i]. We could review a sample of them and if it makes sense, I can update the posts by putting a [plain][i][/plain] tag around it.


Yesterday I saw one of my own posts from long ago, which mysteriously changed to all italics. I find it hard to believe I posted that and went away without seeing a problem, but perhaps I did back then. But if there was a software change that has retroactively made correct-appearing posts wrong, that would explain it.

I don't like the sound of 'review a sample'. I've recently been working on a program to fish out unwanted codes in RTF files, and 'review a sample' is not a workable solution. If you miss a single one, everything after it comes out in italics or whatever. I think I've seen situations here - possibly under older software - where an unclosed tag affected multiple posts after it. What I do now is write a program that counts all the potential errors, and if the numbers are small enough, writes them out for examination. Then I decide whether I can make substitutions programmatically or have to do it by hand.

In this forum, most of the errors will be in long-dormant posts, but any one of those could be revived tomorrow - that's how I saw my own ten-year-old error recently. I don't think there's an easy fix, and I don't know how much time you can afford to spend studying it.

_Update_.
Ouch. Here's another thread with two of my replies in it, and wildly wrong because I repeatedly used [i]. Now I might have made one post and gone away without looking at it, but two? So this seems to confirm it looked correct after posting.


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## elroy

Awwal12 said:


> the quickest method


I don't understand your method.


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## Peterdg

elroy said:


> I don't understand your method.


Neither do I.


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## Awwal12

elroy said:


> I don't understand your method.


 Instead of surrounding your bracketed symbol with [plain][/plain], it's usually quicker to put some tag _inside_ the square brackets of the symbol in question, so the original combination of symbols is destroyed and the engine doesn't parse it as a tag anymore. Of course, the new tag must be closed right away so it doesn't influence anything in the text (also unlike the space symbol proposed above, which is, sadly, visible).
"The sound [i] is widespread" > The sound _ is widespread_
"The sound [[b][/b]i] is widespread" > The sound [i] is widespread


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## elroy

Oh, I see.  I assume you have to switch to BB mode to do that?


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## Awwal12

elroy said:


> Oh, I see.  I assume you have to switch to BB mode to do that?


Manually typing [b][/b] (or any other similar combination) works regardless of what mode you're currently in.
However, you should be in BB mode to succesfully *edit* the message already containing that trick, or you'll botch everything.


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## elroy

Oh, whoops, I thought you could switch to BB mode and just click the B icon, but it looks like those icons get grayed out in BB mode, so you have to type it manually anyway.


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