I can get on all threads except one

[Sgreen]

Anyone else having trouble accessing a thread. I can get on everyone except !*@^%)@ etsy any ideas?

Simon

 

[fingwe]

No idea, it's working for me. Have you tried a different browser, or clearing your browser cache?

 

[iandel]

I don't have a problem. All the threads are accessible

 

[Sgreen]

Thanks for the advice. I will download chrome and try it with that. I cleared the cache and that didn't do it.

No idea, it's working for me. Have you tried a different browser, or clearing your browser cache?

 

[Sgreen]

Thanks fingwe. I have downloaded Chrome and it works fine now. I was on Microsoft Edge before (if that helps anyone who may have the same problem)

 

[Phil Dart]

I don't know that this is the answer, but is may be that your browser or your firewall protection is interpreting the thread title, being a mixture of symbols, as something dodgy and therefore restricting your access. Just a thought.

 

[Penpal]

In Chrome works well from here.

Glad you are all clear now Edge keeps pushing me around every now and then when I boot up.

Peter.

 

[fortress]

That happened to me at work Simon, but when I got home it worked. It's Angelo's thread talking about selling His pens.

 

[Morse]

Hi Simon.
Like you it is the only Thread that I cant view to. I'm on IE. (because I like it)
Dave

 

[GSteer]

You might want coffee or whisky before this.

Initially it appeared to be an Edge and IE related issue on Windows 10. Tested on two machines running different AV (Avira/Eset) in Edge/IE/Chrome. Chrome functions fine, in Edge/IE the hyperlink doesn't pop in the lower status box meaning the browser is limiting access to it.

This is most likely, as Phil says, due to the special characters in the string of the thread title. I suspected the % as this is used to represent specific special characters in hyperlinks via ASCII/UTF-8 table lookups.

e.g.

We want to see this:

http://somewebsite/some photo.jpg

But this is how it's presented so the machine can understand the space, which itself is represented as a ASCII/UTF-8 table lookup in hex notation with the % being the indicator to the browser:

http://somewebsite/some%20photo.jpg

That would mean Edge/IE are reading the link including the ' !*@^%)@' and either trying to evaluate %)@ as a hex value, which, er, doesn't exist as hex values are only 0-9 and A-F (or a combination thereof), or is simply ignoring the link as it's technically invalid as % is a reserved character for encoding.

A bit more digging shows the actual link that the forum is presenting through Chrome to you is:

http://www.penturners.co.uk/off-topic-forum/19511-*@%5E%-@-etsy.html

The forum has already replaced some of the characters and the ^ has been encoded to hex as %5E, but the remaining trailing % still exists and hasn't been encoded. If you copy/paste that URL into Edge/IE it won't go anywhere.

It appears that Chrome is reading this URL and dynamically replacing the unencoded % with %25 which is it's correct value, therefore working around the problem.

If we manually modify the URL and encode the % ourselves we get the following link (note the %25):

http://www.penturners.co.uk/off-topic-forum/19511-*@%5E%25-@-etsy.html

Here's an actual link of the above: http://www.penturners.co.uk/off-topic-forum/19511-*@^%-@-etsy.html

Now, go paste that into Edge or IE, it works fine. By all means paste it into Chrome too, it takes you to the same place.

In summary: It looks like, for some unknown reasons, the forum software doesn't appear to have encoded the second % value correctly to %25 and Edge/IE are following international standards to the letter (see the IETF / RFC links below), therefore ignoring the link. Not ruling out other possibilities of course, and this is a niche case.

Quickest solution: Mods, edit the thread title to remove the %'s.

Now, where's that coffee.

----
Ref:
ASCII / Hex values for standard characters in URL Encoding:
HTML URL Encoding Reference

RFC for URL Encoding:
RFC 3986 - Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax

The Internet Engineering Task Force: Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)

 

[wm460]

No probs here on chrome and firefox.

 

[Walter]

Quickest solution: Mods, edit the thread title to remove the %'s.

OK, done that, someone want to try it now please.

 

[GSteer]

OK, done that, someone want to try it now please.

Yup, working in Edge/IE now.

 

[Morse]

Yep, second that. Thanks Walter