The Case of the Missing Paragraph

October 13, 2007 2:33 PM

I was trying to click and highlight a couple of lines of text in Firefox and the whole paragraph disappeared. What just happened?

According to the source code, the paragraph tag became "visibility: hidden".

I was just clicking and dragging and pressing CTRL, maybe in some weird combination; it happened in Firefox; and on refresh it reappeared.

Sooo... what was it?

posted by dubadubowbow to computers & internet (8 comments total)

You probably hit an extra key by accident. It happens to me all the time. When text is highlighted and you press any printing key, the old text is replaced by the new character.

Unfortunately, there's no way to get it back. That's why when I am composing something long and complex, I do it in an external program first, either Notepad or Frontpage, depending on what it is.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 3:56 PM on October 13, 2007

>Unfortunately, there's no way to get it back

Not so. Just hit undo (control-Z on Windows) to revert the change.

My guess dubadubowbow is that you managed to trigger some javascript on the page to hide the paragraph. Without knowing what page it was or what you did, it's pretty hard to speculate.
posted by zachlipton at 4:25 PM on October 13, 2007

maybe it's the next step in the war on cut&paste, waged by some less enightened websites: you tried to "steal" our text? take *that*.
posted by jepler at 4:33 PM on October 13, 2007

I'm sorry, I read your post wrong. I thought you were talking about text in an entry box, like the one I'm typing into right now.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 5:32 PM on October 13, 2007

maybe the site doesn't want people copying text from their pages, and so their pages have a script to prevent selection. I haven't seen this before but I have come across several sites that disable right-click so you can't save images from them (easily).

Post the url of the page. I'll have a look at it and if that is the case I'll write you a GreaseMonkey script to disable that behavior. The whole content of such would probably be something like

unsafeWindow.hideText = function {};

which would override what ever function they are using.
posted by MonkeySaltedNuts at 6:09 PM on October 13, 2007

Here's the page. I don't think they were trying to keep me from copying and pasting, since I can now and always have been able to do that without problem. It was just... kind of weird.

Actually, I just duplicated it. Shift and a double click on any text just sets the text's visibility to hidden. And as a matter of fact, I just tried it on your comments, and it works on Metafilter's site as well. So, I think it's a Firefox thing. Any ideas what's with it?
posted by dubadubowbow at 12:01 AM on October 14, 2007

And again, I just disabled Adblock and restarted Firefox and it was gone. So I guess it's Adblock's doing. Don't know why, maybe to block text ads or something.
posted by dubadubowbow at 12:05 AM on October 14, 2007

Good spot, dubadubowbow. It is indeed adblock. According to their website it's some feature called "Quickblock" (and it can be toggled with Control+Shift+k).
posted by gds at 2:02 AM on October 14, 2007