ETA for fix to style in Visual Studio forums?

Question

When can we expect the style for posts in the Visual Studio forums to be fixed so that we can see bold and italics again?

See my previous post on the issue, which supposedly opened issue (#78475).

Other threads referring to this issue:

• http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vbgeneral/thread/b08c761d-e294-408b-8738-790b1baeaafe
  
• http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/reportabug/thread/42b1dd0f-6c03-4faa-adca-48eb55084ae3
• AND MOST IMPORTANTLY (with at least 19 +votes): http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/reportabug/thread/394ac0d4-19a1-4b24-9a6b-e2726d980228

This problem has existed for an entire quarter now.

Answer 1

Hello?  Anybody there?

Bold is still unusable in the visual studio forums.  Is it going to be fixed?

Answer 2

I'll ask if there is any update.

Thanks!

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Ed Price (a.k.a User Ed), SQL Server Customer Program Manager (Blog, Twitter, Wiki)

Answer 3

Hi Ed and Wyck,

We will let you if there is any update from engineer team.

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Have a great day, Jundan

Answer 4

HI Wyck,

According to the repro steps below (provided in the bug), this issue is resolved from my side. Would you please verify and let us know? Thanks!

1. In this page http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vcgeneral/thread/aeef9d3f-be32-4e43-9ad0-37a01a1b5909/#b9cbafdb-e65c-4f4f-8b25-c7890623a7b9  , click reply.

2. Type the information, then click ”B”

3. Submit the thread, not showing bold formatting.

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Have a great day, Jundan

Answer 5

HI Wyck,

According to the repro steps below (provided in the bug), this issue is resolved from my side. Would you please verify and let us know? Thanks!

1. In this page http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vcgeneral/thread/aeef9d3f-be32-4e43-9ad0-37a01a1b5909/#b9cbafdb-e65c-4f4f-8b25-c7890623a7b9  , click reply.

2. Type the information, then click ”B”

3. Submit the thread, not showing bold formatting.

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Have a great day, Jundan

Still broken when viewed with the Google Chrome browser.

Answer 6

Thanks， will pass this to engineer team.

BTW, did you try IE browser?

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Have a great day, Jundan

Answer 7

Thanks， will pass this to engineer team.

BTW, did you try IE browser?

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Have a great day, Jundan

Yes, I can see bold formatting correctly with Internet Explorer.

But it's also broken in Safari.

Answer 8

Are you still able to repro this? Thanks!

Answer 9

I see bold as bold now in the first mentioned link in Google Chrome.

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For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Becker's Law


My blog

Answer 10

Great! Thanks.

Answer 11

Are you still able to repro this? Thanks!

It's fixed!  *applause*.  Oh, wait, I don't have to use asterisks any more!

But seriously...  thank you!

Answer 12

Now Bold is broken in the Windows Forms General forum!

Here is an example thread from the Windows Forms General forum that has correct markup but incorrect style (observed in both IE and chrome).

In fact, all the text of the style of that particular forum looks a little too bold to my eye.  But regardless of that, there is no visible difference between bold and non-bold text due to the bogus style.

I'm sure other forums with similar style will be similarly broken.  Boo!  :(

Answer 13

Thanks for reporting this, Wyck. i will check this and update you as soon as possible.

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Have a great day, Jundan

Answer 14

Hi Wyck,

In the example thread, I can't reproduce the bold issue in chrome and IE . Can you please try again?

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Have a great day, Jundan

Answer 15

Hi Wyck,

In the example thread, I can't reproduce the bold issue in chrome and IE . Can you please try again?

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Have a great day, Jundan

Actually you did reproduce the issue just fine.  Look at your signature in your test post.  It's too strong, and not the same font as "test".

But let me show you the problem explicitly:

This post, (written by me) from that thread, contains the following text 

Should be picMapTour.Invalidate() instead of this.Invalidate(). 'this' is the form. whereas picMapTour is the PictureBox that is painting.

Ignore the style of it in the blockquote above, but if you "view source" or "inspect element" in your browser for the text as is appears in the post in that forum, you'll see that the markup for this over there is:

<p>Should be <strong>picMapTour</strong>.Invalidate()&nbsp; instead of&nbsp;<strong>this</strong>.Invalidate(). &nbsp; '<em>this</em>' is the form. &nbsp;whereas
<em>picMapTour</em> is the PictureBox that is painting.</p>

But the <strong>'s aren't coming through with bold style.

Also, if you look at your test post, you'll see that even the non-bold text that you wrote has a different style than the body text of other people's non-bold text.  Yours is a lighter weight font.

If you look around the forum (even just at the other posts in that thread) you'll see that there are many posts where all the text is uniformly too strong.  (It's like half way between bold and non-bold, to my eye.)

So getting back to my claim that you DID in fact, reproduce the issue with your test post.   If you look at your post, the text of "test" is light weight, the text of "bold" is bold. and your signature of "Have a great day, Jundan" is that weird half-bold and demonstrates the problem.  This weird half-bold style is applied to 100% of some people's posts, including mine, and it is in THOSE blocks of text that the <strong> markup is not working correctly, and the font is generally too strong.

I hope that's enough detail for you to be able to report a bug and fix it.

Answer 16

Hi Wyck，

I had forward the issue you described to engineer team. Will keep you updated.

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Have a great day, Jundan

Answer 17

Was bitten by this lack of bold today again in another forum post.  I've resorted to using alternate markup again.  Please give me my bold back.

Answer 18

Was bitten by this lack of bold today again in another forum post.  I've resorted to using alternate markup again.  Please give me my bold back.

Wyck,

Just to confirm, the text style is not correct or bold is not working?

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Have a great day, Jundan

Answer 19

Was bitten by this lack of bold today again in another forum post.  I've resorted to using alternate markup again.  Please give me my bold back.

Wyck,

Just to confirm, the text style is not correct or bold is not working?

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Have a great day, Jundan

My original complaint on Dec 19 was that the style was not correct.  The markup and interaction was working as expected.

But I see now (Dec 20) that the styles have been fixed as of some time early this morning.  The posts look much better now that the forum has the correct styles.

So that's great!  Thanks to whoever fixed it. :)

--- EDIT: DEC 21 ---

Uhm.  Not so good any more.  Chrome and IE9 on Windows 7 both show bogus bold styles again.  

(I may have observed it fixed under Windows XP but I was a little blurry eyed this morning, what with the apocalypse and all...)

--- EDIT: DEC 21 PM ---

Good news, and bad news.  

Good: no apocalypse.  

Bad:  I confirmed that the styles are correct on my Windows XP machine but don't work on my Windows 7 machine.

Answer 20

Definitely not fixed yet.  :(

Answer 21

Proof that this is still not working for Chrome or internet explorer on Windows 7.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsdirectshowdevelopment/thread/a4e677d7-8519-45c8-aa60-93f7cb411a32

Again, text with <strong> markup doesn't appear to have any visibly different style from normal text on Windows 7.
I'm unmarking as answer too, based on the fact that it's still broken.

Answer 22

Wyck， I had escalated this issue. Will keep you posted of updates.

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Have a great day, Jundan

Answer 23

Wyck, the problem is solved. Can you please verify?

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Have a great day, Jundan

Answer 24

Wyck, the problem is solved. Can you please verify?

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Have a great day, Jundan

Sorry, not solved.  I clicked on this link:  http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsdirectshowdevelopment/thread/a4e677d7-8519-45c8-aa60-93f7cb411a32 and still see that my "test bold" has <strong> markup on "bold" but does not appear so.

This screenshot shows both the rendering of the page, and the markup.  I've drawn a red line to indicate the correspondence.  Note that "bold" has <strong> markup, but does not appear so when rendered.

Answer 25

I will follow up this issue with engineer team, and update you if having.

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Have a great day, Jundan

Answer 26

Wyck,

The Forums Issues forum isn't a support site. It exists to make the issues known to the Forums team. And that is done.

We don't guarantee any fixes.

For more information about this forum: http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/reportabug/thread/416b1315-31b2-43e0-8806-d43fbf287076

Forum Issue Support

To open a support ticket about a specific forum issue, see Option 1; Option 2. Or email "fissues" at Microsoft.

Thanks!

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Ed Price (a.k.a User Ed), SQL Server Customer Program Manager (Blog, Small Basic, Wiki Ninjas, Wiki)

Answer an interesting question? Create a wiki article about it!

Answer 27

I am not sure fissues is any better, Ed. I emailed many bugs to them and very rarely get any replies. One bug, which is affecting my points, have been here for 5+ months. There is some minor improvement as now you get an error and there is nothing else (the message is not marked), so potentially a person may re-try (as I do when it doesn't work the first time), but 99% of people will never re-try and the answer doesn't receive its recognition as deserved.

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For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Becker's Law


My blog

Answer 28

I am not sure fissues is any better, Ed. I emailed many bugs to them and very rarely get any replies. One bug, which is affecting my points, have been here for 5+ months. There is some minor improvement as now you get an error and there is nothing else (the message is not marked), so potentially a person may re-try (as I do when it doesn't work the first time), but 99% of people will never re-try and the answer doesn't receive its recognition as deserved.

especially as many peoples are hurted by the annoying issues in the forums.

If all these people would send a bug report to fissues you would get be flooded by similar reports making your work to drainage bug more harder.

I would recommand that you use this forum as main communication channel for bugs / issues related to all the forums. that way you've a single source of reports and we know that a bug / issue had already be reported to Microsoft .

Especially look at the URL for this forum which states that this forum is to report bugs:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/reportabug

Ed,

do you and us a favor and consider the above proposal.

Answer 29

But the question is - when we can expect fixes? Say, if the bug is there for 6 months or more, does it mean that our communication is not effective?

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For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Becker's Law


My blog

Answer 30

I am not sure fissues is any better, Ed. I emailed many bugs to them and very rarely get any replies. One bug, which is affecting my points, have been here for 5+ months. There is some minor improvement as now you get an error and there is nothing else (the message is not marked), so potentially a person may re-try (as I do when it doesn't work the first time), but 99% of people will never re-try and the answer doesn't receive its recognition as deserved.

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For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Becker's Law


My blog

Well they were responding to you directly (I was on those emails) before you started emailing them three times a day. =^)

I think they recently got bombarded with so many issues that they're just trying to catch up so they can listen again.

Thanks!

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Ed Price (a.k.a User Ed), SQL Server Customer Program Manager (Blog, Small Basic, Wiki Ninjas, Wiki)

Answer an interesting question? Create a wiki article about it!

Answer 31

Daniel,

As the name implies, the forum exists to report a bug, not to fix it. It's not a support site.

Nobody on the Forums team supports this forum. It's just me and some community folks, and we're not on the Forums team.

All we can do is make sure the forums team gets the bugs, and that's what this forum does.

Thanks!

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Ed Price (a.k.a User Ed), SQL Server Customer Program Manager (Blog, Small Basic, Wiki Ninjas, Wiki)

Answer an interesting question? Create a wiki article about it!

Answer 32

I think they recently got bombarded with so many issues that they're just trying to catch up so they can listen again.

Thanks!

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Ed Price (a.k.a User Ed)

Two phrases spring immediately to mind....

1) Dog-fooding

2) Beta-testing

<eg>

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Noel Paton | Nil Carborundum Illegitemi | CrashFixPC | The Three-toed Sloth
No - I do not work for Microsoft, or any of its contractors.

Answer 33

Not really, they responded only few times. I usually respond on all my e-mails.

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For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Becker's Law


My blog

Answer 34

Hi Wyck,

Engineering team is looking into this issue. I should be able to update you soon!

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Have a great day, Jundan

Answer 35

Thanks, everyone.  I appreciate the efforts put in by all.  And, I can now grok the difference between reporting issues and product support: that it's OK to bring forum issues to people's attention by reporting them here, but that this isn't a support forum, in that I'm not going to be tightly connected to the mechanism through which any forum software defects are corrected.

It's a little disappointing, but I understand.  Hopefully it's still OK to have the back and forth of "thanks for reporting...wait...try it now...is it fixed yet...yes/no", but I'll put less emphasis on me urging the forums team to provide fixes.  

But I may not always be able to resist the urge to make an issue report read in my whining & complaining voice. ;)

Have I got you right on this, @Ed?

Answer 36

Thanks, everyone.  I appreciate the efforts put in by all.  And, I can now grok the difference between reporting issues and product support: that it's OK to bring forum issues to people's attention by reporting them here, but that this isn't a support forum, in that I'm not going to be tightly connected to the mechanism through which any forum software defects are corrected.

It's a little disappointing, but I understand.  Hopefully it's still OK to have the back and forth of "thanks for reporting...wait...try it now...is it fixed yet...yes/no", but I'll put less emphasis on me urging the forums team to provide fixes.  

But I may not always be able to resist the urge to make an issue report read in my whining & complaining voice. ;)

Have I got you right on this, @Ed?

Yes that's right. It's not too different from other forums.

You go to the SQL Server forum, you mostly get workarounds and how-to's. You don't get someone fixing SQL Server. The most you can get there is someone taking your input into consideration while the next release is being worked on.

Same thing here.

Thanks!

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Ed Price (a.k.a User Ed), SQL Server Customer Program Manager (Blog, Small Basic, Wiki Ninjas, Wiki)

Answer an interesting question? Create a wiki article about it!

Answer 37

For SQL Server bugs you report them on MS Connect website (and other products, although not all - say, for Entity Framework there is completely different venue to report problems).

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For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Becker's Law


My blog