Posts being made as HTML comments by default?

AI-generated summary

A Discourse instance was experiencing issues where multiple posts were being made as HTML comments by default. teward initially suspected it might be due to a plugin or a dockerized instance issue, but later discovered the root cause. The problem arose from certain categories having an HTML comment block in their templates, which users were not instructed to remove or post outside of. As a result, users were unintentionally posting their content within the comment blocks. teward attributed the issue to a combination of User Error and Staff Doing A Stupid.

An instance of Discourse I admin has had a complaint that multiple posts are being posted by default as HTML comments such as:

<!--

This is the actual content of a post.
-->

However, there are no special plugins enabled other than the retort plugin and the discourse-solved plugin which could do this.

We’re on the latest update as of today, has anyone ever seen this happen on a dockerized instance?

Do these lines start with 4 spaces? Can you link to a post?

Nope, I figured out the problem. The core problem was some categories have a template created with an HTML comment block in them.

And the users are not told to post outside the comment block, and simply remove the “Please read the guidelines” content between the comment lines and write their ipost in there.

So it’s entirely a combination of User Error and Staff Doing A Stupid

That is a powerful combo :rofl: