Tynt Tracer Must Die

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First of all, I want to thank everyone who runs this forum for the fine job they've done. While I myself have not yet had any need for help, I have enjoyed and learned while helping others.

Due diligence disclaimer: I searched for a discussion on this issue, using "tynt" and "copy paste", but found none. Hopefully, I did not miss it. Also, I searched my control panel to see if there was already a remedy there, but I found none.

Okay, now down to business :wink:

When trying to help someone, I can't even paste their one-liner into a terminal window without it causing problems.

For example, a few minutes ago, while trying to assist over at SED help - cleaning up code, extra spaces won't go away, copying a modest one-line pipeline resulted in the following paste to my terminal:

VAR=`awk -F, '{print $2}' input.txt | sed  's/-i/\|/g;s/^.\{1\}//g;s/ //g'`
View Original:  hxxp://www.unix.com/shell-programming-scripting/135131-sed-help-cleaning-up-code-extra-spaces-wont-go-away.html#ixzz0m26OTbwo

Having to delete that in a text editor when copy-pasting someone's sample data is just a mild annoyance, but to have that in the terminal is just terrible. It produces junk on the screen, junk in command history, and in a case-insensitive environment with vim installed (osx, for example), "View Original: ....." brings up vi in read-only mode.

For the love of all that you hold dear, is there any possibility that the tynt tracer script can be nuked from orbit? If not, can the char limit before it kicks in be bumped up a bit, so that it allows copying a few lines of code/data before it kicks in? If not, perhaps users who have enough bits or helpful posts could have access to a knob in their control panel to disable it? If not, perhaps it can only be included on pages for threads that have not had any activity in a day or two? (I'm just tossing out ideas in case any of them are palatable.)

If there is no chance of this going away, I would appreciate an explanation. Not because it is owed to me -- I do not feel any entitlement in that regard -- but because I am simply curious to know why something with such an obvious downside is embraced (does it help that much with traffic and/or attribution?).

Any consideration you give this post is greatly appreciated. Worst case, I'll just go back to using the javascript-less environment I was using. The downside of that is that notifications tend to go unnoticed for days. Not such a big deal, I suppose.

Again, despite my first thread being a whinge, I sincerely appreciate the work the staff has put into the site. It's a nice place. Keep it up.

Best wishes,
Alister

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We installed this as a test case to see how content was being copied and pasted to other sites. So far, we don't seem to have received much benefit, frankly speaking. Some links are generated back to the site, but, unfortunately, the majority of the links are generated within the site by users like yourself.

I agree with you that it is annoying to have this enabled when copy-and-pasting within this same site (versus only tracking copy-and-paste to other sites), and we don't seem to be able to turn it off (by configuration) for copy-and-paste tracing on the same site, unfortunately.

I have no problem turning it off, if it is that annoying to cut/copy and paste on the site.

Does anyone else have an opinion?

(Attachments: Overview stats, not yet running 7 full days)

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This button on this link will disable Tynt for the browser you are in:

Tynt Opt In/Out

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Hi tyntguy,

I think it would be better if there was a "blanket" configuration option to turn off Tynt for copy-and-paste withing the same site.

In other words, if you are posting on www. unix.com and you cut-and-paste withing the selected domain (www. unix.com to www. unix.com), then we should have a configuration option in the control panel to turn it off for for this "internal" case, because content is not actually "leaving" this site.

---------- Post updated at 17:03 ---------- Previous update was at 16:58 ----------

OBTW, I forgot to mention that one of the site benefits of TYNT is that when a poster double posts by copy and pasting within the site, it does automatically post to the other post. We thought that was a nice unintended "side effect" because it helped with double posting reference back to the original post (and made the mods jobs easier).

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Thx Neo. We've been working on the ability to turn off attribution when copying into the same domain. Let me check on the status of that.

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Update: Due to the concerns voice by alister and also a concern voiced by one of the mods about formatting issues on the site, and the fact we can't disable for intra-site copy-and-paste, I have disabled Tynt until (1) others voice their opinion and add comments and (2) Tynt provides a way to turn off Tynt inside the site (intra-site copy and paste).

I don't think single browser "opt out" is going to be acceptable to power users on the site.

---------- Post updated at 17:15 ---------- Previous update was at 17:13 ----------

Thanks.

In the meantime, I've disabled due to valid voiced concerns by two valuable members of the team.

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Hello, Neo:

Thank you very much for the swift response. It's appreciated.

In case it is not a moot point, I wanted to clarify my concern.

Personally, I have not been bothered by copy-pasting within the site. For me, the source of all frustration is when I paste someone's shell code into a terminal window. The attributive text fires up vi on osx, and on other machines generates benign (thankfully) command not found errors.

In my opinion, tynt is simply a poor fit for a forum whose users often copy-paste text from a browser to a terminal, which happens to interpret that text and run commands.

However this pans out, thanks for taking the time to consider the issue.

Alister

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Agreed.

That is also a significant negative. We certainly don't want users to be troubled when they copy-and-paste into editors.

If we were seeing Tynt generating significant attribution links back to the site, then it might make sense to ask posters to opt-out on a broswer-by-browser basis. However, since we are only seeing an insignificant number of attribution links back to the site, the benefit of Tynt does not outweight the negatives for a forum like ours.

We greatly appreciate feedback from our users. Thank you very much.

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Blog followup post here, FYI:

Suggested Improvements for Tynt

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So that's what was doing that? Started seeing that appearing but had no idea why. I agree, it's not a helpful feature. Humans can just edit that out besides, whereas automated trawlers would never be copy/pasting in the first place.

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I too wondered what was going wrong. Some cut/paste of "CODE" sections lost line breaks and gained a spurious link reference line. No good if you wanted to run some piece of code through a syntax checker.

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Till now, I was in the impression that it is my browser/clipboard/terminal issue or something like that.
Since I copied the code only once (with this issue), so I wasn't much worried about that.
I completely agree with the other member's remarks mentioned above.