T w e n t y S i d e d

Here is a strange one for you. Open up WordPress, and make a new post. Into this post put the words:

“Delete”

Then the word:

“from”

Hit save.

Watch WordPress puke all over itself.

This is a very strange bug. Both words must appear in that order with no other letters between them, but you can have line-breaks between them and it still happens. What on earth is going on here?

The problem surfaced when I tried to edit this old post. I saw a typo I wanted to correct, so I edited the post and hit save, which led to the Bizzare error:

Precondition Failed
The precondition on the request for the URL /twentysidedtale/wp-admin/post.php evaluated to false.

Halfway down the page I quote Lileks, and that quote contains the deadly words. It took me a long, long time to figure out what the problem was. Obviously I wrote that post in an earlier version of WordPress that doesn’t have this bug, and now that I’ve upgraded I can’t edit the post without removing those words. I spent a long time removing secitions of the post until I had isolated the offending words.

One guess is that the phrase “de1ete from” is getting misunderstood or misused as part of a command to mySQL. Still, that really shouldn’t happen.

FURTHER NOTE: I’m using WP 2.0.2 and I have the fancy-pants editor turned off.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.