Constant bold fail on app

[BitOutOfPractice]

Hi lovely MN people.

I am constantly having bold fail when I try to use the * method. Usually when I’m quoting another MNer. It’s starting to make me look slightly unhinged

I’m on iPhone 6s iOS 11.0.3

Not a massive problem but thought I’d raise it

thank you all for reporting. We are like a bunch of asterisking lunatics right now.

this poor poster will be ripping her hair out. BUT a good example of the problem:

So in my office there is one girl who has nominated herself as the ‘lunch getter’ as she is the* only one who has the time to actually leave the building on her break. She is the most junior so has a lighter workload than the rest of us. The rest of us just eat at our desk or take 10 mins where we can. We have nowhere to store food from home either so I tend not to bring* it in.
Anyways, so every time I* tell her what I want, ‘conveniently’ the shop doesn’t have it or she gets me the ‘light’ or ‘diet’ version by ‘mistake’. Even if there are 3 of us having the same sandwich, she’ll give the other two* theirs and mine will be the ‘light’ version!

Thing is... I’m* not even big!! I’m a size 12 so not super super skinny, but I go to the gym 3 times a week and don’t eat a lot of crap. I’m genuinely staring to think that she is* trying to ‘thin me down’ or something!

So, AIBU to start fattening her up? She’s* a tiny little thing and I* think it would be sweet revenge...

I'll continue to look into this, thanks for your patience!

I'm a little confused as to why it's an issue now, as I understand, we haven't made any changes to the formatting editor in a few years. Has it always been this way, or is there a recent bug?

This has been the last couple of weeks or so for me.

Recent bug Tim.

Perhaps because iOS has updated?

It’s always been fine for me until the last couple of week when I can’t make —strikethrough— work and all the bold problems.

Weird.

Definitely a recent thing. Since the ios11 update in my iPhone

My phone won’t let me —strikethrough— but will let me bold - I downloaded the latest iPhone software this week....

There were definitely no asterisks in my post when I typed it. I wasn’t trying to embolden anything except “op” which worked fine.

I think this is an asterisk problem not an old problem iyswim

@BitOutOfPractice how did you embolden the op? Did you use:

1. asterisks, or the
2. The ‘T’ formatting button in the app
3. Highlighting and selecting bold from the black selection menu

I’m currently struggling to reproduce the rogue asterisks on iOS 11.2, 11.1 and 10

2 - I used the app formatting button. I'm on iOS 11.1 (I didn't think 11.2 was out yet!)

Sorry not to be more helpful. I just know I didn't type any asterisks there. But f rogue ones are appearing it may explain the random bolding

@BitOutOfPractice that's great, thanks! I'll keep looking into it.

I use asterisks when on the app.

I’ve noticed it’s definitely when the phone autocorrects something after I’ve used bold.

Tim Mumsnet I’ll see if I can recreate it by bolding your name and then writing something that autocorrects or autocompletes.**

I’ve added the above para as a screenshot as it appears to me in draft.**

There, it’s bolded the second para and added an asterisk for no reason.

To slightly paraphrase a classic mn phrase, we haven’t got a bold problem, we’ve got an asterisk problem

Sorry Tim I bet this is driving you crazy

Hello @TimMumsnet

Here's an interesting one.

The first picture is how my post shows on my phone. I used the B button but only to enbolden the name at the start. It looked perfect before I pressed send.

The second is how it appears on my desktop PC. Asterisks a go-go that I certainly never typed!

I just saw something on Twitter about the IOS update causing problems with autocorrect (which I’ve noticed myself with random words capitalising etc) - specifically about additional symbols appearing. I wonder if one of the effects is related to asterisks? Or if the new symbols are causing an effect?

It doesn’t explain why we can’t see them in draft though.

There are double-asterisks appearing all over the place, it's really annoying!

I think Tim has given up and gone to the pub

Hey TimMNHQ, did you manage to find out if your developers can fix —strikethrough—

As I’ve mentiined upthread the problem is that iOS 11 autocorrects the two hyphens so they become one straight line. Which your formatting code doesn’t like.

Solution could be to change the 2 hyphens to a different character eg ## or == hash or equals signs which don’t autocorrect. Simples.

Shouldn’t be too difficult??

I’m marking my place on this because the bold is driving me mad!

Hey guys, thanks for your patience with this one.

I think I’ve got a fix for the strike through that is going through approval now, but I’m not sure about the bold issue yet. It looks like iOS11 has made a number of changes that has required quite a bit of development time (iPhone X 😑).

Again, thanks for your patience, I’ll let you know when a fix is live!

I've just released an update to the iOS Talk app on the App Store here - this should fix the dash bug, but there is at least one other remaining bug we're looking into.

Thanks Tim. It seems to me that many many apps are struggling with the changes that iOS has made to accomodate iPhone X, I'm seeing sooooo many app updates at the moment

That's not surprising, Apple have changed the way navigation bars and tab bars work to accommodate the funky rounded corners and new status bar.