I was typing out a new message to one of my users, didn’t have time to write a normal title so I basically punched the keyboard and typed the following string as the title:
=213=-!(@#+@)(!*_(@#&(!)#
The intended user received the message, but when clicked, he received a “Can’t access the page.”
On my end, the website took me to a random system-to-user message.
I’ve tried to replicate this on meta, and when I sent the message I got redirected to an “Oooops, this page doesn’t exist.”
So, something is up, but I don’t know what. Something in that string causes a bug.
It feels like a stretch to consider a title like that causing problems a bug that interferes with normal use.
Contrived edge case or not, it would be a good idea to determine the actual problem.
I wouldn’t use meta to test, your dev setup is the place to test. Anyway, my guess is the hash is causing some kind of fragment identifier conflict. If you try the same but without the “#” is there still a problem?
This is now fixed as per https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/8554. We just treat titles that boil down to a number the same way as if you just put a the number 213 for your topic title.