Floating Gibberish Text

I’ve only seen this happen 2 times now on our forum and it’s more of a curiosity thing than a real issue but…

Text will sometimes get displaced by floating, un-aligned characters as shown in the 2 examples below.

In a topic’s first post:

In a user’s profile description:

I like to joke they are summoning Norse gods and I just need to know if I’m right basically :grinning:

Looks like some sort of character combining?

2 Likes

Looking at the raw version of that post, it seems to be the specific characters that are being used.

4 Likes

Hi,
This kind of writing is known as “cursed text” or “zalgo text” (as sort of a meme) and is used for fun or to annoy.

You can see it here and there, on Reddit, on Discord, etc…

The only way I know to decrease its impact is to add CSS rules such as:

.cooked {
    p, &>div {
        overflow: hidden;
    }
}

Result, from:

To:

This will prevent the content (whatever it is) to bleed out from their container.

But it could have potential unwanted other effects.

5 Likes

Nice. :+1: I supposed you’d have to manually edit them out if people were trolling with them.

2 Likes

Reinforcing what @JammyDodger said, you can check https://forum.esk8.news/raw/60142 to see that this was an intentional stylistic choice from the topic author. It may be the case to contact this user and asks if it can be toned down so it don’t cause readability issues and support requests.

However it was appreaciated at least by someone so it’s a community choice in the end.

4 Likes