[Bug] Instability in the draft community problem IDE?

I’ve got a community problem that’s stuck pending submission for crazy reasons.

This is the link I have, though I’m not sure how “open” it is since it’s still classified as draft, but I cannot un-draft it for reasons highlighted below.

I can’t un-draft it because my code fails one of the tests (test 4, or validator 2, depending on how you want to count it). Kind of ironic, considering my code generated the output in the first place.

Where it gets highly suspicious is in the reported failure:

Failure
Found:   "unethical rude behavior towards yo \0ethical rude behavior toward"
Expected:"unethical rude behavior towards y\0nethical rude behavior toward"

(don’t ask about the contents just yet)

Needless to say, but allow me to anyway: these \0 and repetitions are nowhere to be found (visually) in the statement textboxes, be it the provided input or the expected output. Couldn’t get to highlight them by copy-pasting in a hex dumper either.

I could try and debug my code as long as those weird strings were contained in my program’s proper output as was the case earlier, but they’ve now contaminated the expected output as well, so it’s starting to feel out of reach.

I’m quite puzzled here. :open_mouth:

(not sure it’s related: every now and then the first tests fails on a “program outputs nothing” error. Re-running it (after changing something, anything, in the IDE) usually solves that)

Got it out of draft through various haphazard editing (that really does seem like it came from and went to the same place), so the link above is now public.

If CG staff wants to come back and debug it, just take the last draft revision in the history.

since you were asking about this on the chat, for the record:

I’m sorry I missed this in the first place. Since the instability is 4 years old, and no one reported the same issue to my knowledge, I haven’t sent this to the devs.

I’ll be careful in the future for new bug reports. Thanks.

Don’t beat yourself up, @TwoSteps! When bugs reports are spread between the chat, discourse and the forum, mixed with unrelated content and with no easy way to see what’s already fixed and what is still open, it’s impossible not to miss some. All in all, things are generally working for the most part, and people are having fun on the platform! :slight_smile:

If you do want to be sure that the CG team does not miss any bug report, I don’t think the solution is to be more careful. That will just be more tiring and still fail sometimes. If that’s an important goal, I think the solution would be something that makes it easy to keep track of reports, a.k.a. some kind of public bug tracker.

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This page could have been an acceptable substitute, waiting for a real thing.

Yeah, if it had a way to filter out fixed and non-issues.

You mean, something like a naming convention for titles, subforums and/or thread locking in extreme cases?

That would be a way to approximate bug-tracking in a forum, yes. I’m not sure it’s the best way to go though.

Considering the current situation, I don’t think doing nothing until we’ve found the “best” is reasonable.