Comments on: The Case of the Missing Paragraph

Question: The Case of the Missing Paragraph

dubadubowbow — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 14:33:11 -0800

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?

By: Steven C. Den Beste

Steven C. Den Beste — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 15:56:35 -0800

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.

By: zachlipton

zachlipton — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 16:25:43 -0800

>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.

By: jepler

jepler — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 16:33:53 -0800

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*.

By: Steven C. Den Beste

Steven C. Den Beste — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 17:32:08 -0800

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.

By: MonkeySaltedNuts

MonkeySaltedNuts — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 18:09:39 -0800

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.

By: dubadubowbow

dubadubowbow — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 00:01:45 -0800

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?

By: dubadubowbow

dubadubowbow — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 00:05:36 -0800

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.

By: gds

gds — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 02:02:06 -0800

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).