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What happens when placeholder text doesn’t get replaced

246 点作者 pascal07大约 11 年前

37 条评论

kayhi大约 11 年前
A recent up roar occurred in the world of chemistry when a paper was published with the phrase:<p>&quot;Emma, please insert NMR data here! where are they? and for this compound, just make up an elemental analysis…&quot;<p>Here is a link the supplementary information where the quote is located on page 12. <a href="http://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/om4000067/suppl_file/om4000067_si_002.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubs.acs.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;suppl&#x2F;10.1021&#x2F;om4000067&#x2F;suppl_file&#x2F;o...</a>
chimeracoder大约 11 年前
We had a very funny example of this at my school paper. Our football team was one game away from a winless season, and many people were demanding that the head coach be fired for this terrible performance[0].<p>As a joke, someone referred to Coach Wilson on a pull quote as &quot;head coach of the Columbia football team until Monday morning&quot;. This was supposed to be removed before print, but nobody caught it.<p>To make matters <i>worse</i>, the coach actually <i>was</i> fired that weekend (not even 24 hours after the team had its only win of the season)! That led to an <i>incredibly</i> awkward retraction: (&quot;This was a joke, and we&#x27;re sorry... but apparently we were right, even though we didn&#x27;t know it&quot;[1])<p>This sort of stuff goes on in newsrooms all the time. I&#x27;m actually surprised that these mistakes don&#x27;t happen more often, given how common these are, and given that most copy-editing happens in the wee hours of the morning, fueled by caffeine and sleep deprivation.<p>[0] Don&#x27;t have time to scan through the PDFs of the printed versions (IIRC it was only in the printed version), but it was one of these articles: <a href="http://www.columbiaspectator.com/tags/norries-wilson" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.columbiaspectator.com&#x2F;tags&#x2F;norries-wilson</a><p>[1] I was on the board of the paper at the time, so I can confirm that we actually <i>didn&#x27;t</i> have prior knowledge of this - it really was just a very amusingly-timed joke.
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TacticalCoder大约 11 年前
One of the very best one I&#x27;ve seen back when I was working in the book publishing business (many moons ago) was this: a bogus screenshot (totally unrelated to the book) with a legend saying something like this: <i>&quot;Insert something similar to what&#x27;s in book X at page 237&quot;</i>... With &quot;book X&quot; being the name of a book by a competitor.<p>Somehow everybody (proofreader(s), author(s), etc.) ended missing that and the bogus screenshot and that legend made it to the final, printed, version of the book : )
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VBprogrammer大约 11 年前
Someone I used to work with once left a alert(&#x27;W.A.N.K&#x27;) in the codebase. This was in a fairly rarely occurring branch of code and made it all the way to production.<p>I&#x27;ve taken that as a warning and never write anything I wouldn&#x27;t be happy for a customer to see in logs, test-data, comments (although handfuls of sarcasm are still acceptable) or debugging code.
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jgrahamc大约 11 年前
How I regret not watermarking the Lorem Ipsum wine bottle image.<p><a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/140827340757417984" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;jgrahamc&#x2F;status&#x2F;14082734075741798...</a>
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chaz大约 11 年前
Stopping for 30 seconds to come up with subpar copy is usually worth it vs using some sort of placeholder that you need to come back and fix later. When I know the copy is awful and that I need to come back and replace it, I put in a comment that says<p><pre><code> # COPY_REQUIRED </code></pre> As long as I&#x27;m consistent about the tag that I use, I can easily search my project for my tags and fix before launch.<p>Similarly, I do a fair amount of presentations, and I always put in huge red letters a note to update the metrics, provide a source, etc. It&#x27;s hard to miss when doing a final flip-through.
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dspillett大约 11 年前
There was a great example of this with QR codes, though amusingly I can&#x27;t find the link at all at the moment...<p>For a while the first hit in Google&#x27;s image search for QR Code was a code for a person&#x27;s personal site which he&#x27;d put up as a test and by happenstance got picked up by a few places which a few other places picked it up from and so forth. All fine when you are explaining QR codes and are fine pushing people to some random but currently inoffensive site, but a number of places used it up as a placeholder in adversing campaigns then forgot to replace it with one representing the real URL before going to print.<p>The owner of the page knew what had happened as he had offers to rent or buy the URL, demands that he turn it over when he didn&#x27;t want to, and even threats of being sued for &quot;hacking our advertising&quot;. IIRC he never &quot;sold the URL&quot; instead leaving his personal page in place. He had the good grace not to add something offensive to the page, which I&#x27;m sure I would have done after receiving any such demand or threat. I would have least published a list of the fools that fell into the &quot;trap&quot; with a copy of relevant correspondence (sanitised to remove names and such).
einhverfr大约 11 年前
This sort of thing can also happen when people are not really <i>able</i> to check to make sure the content is correct. For example, see <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2008/nov/01/5" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;theguardian&#x2F;2008&#x2F;nov&#x2F;01&#x2F;5</a>.<p>Fortunately the text was bilingual and I doubt there are many Welsh who don&#x27;t speak English...
kalleboo大约 11 年前
Or placeholder products... <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=dave+s+test+pid" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=dave+s+test+pid</a>
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scott_s大约 11 年前
Such an instance lead to a libel lawsuit at Virginia Tech in 1996 when the student paper left &quot;director of butt licking&quot; as the title for an administrator in a pulled quote.<p>Article from &#x27;96 on the filing: <a href="http://www.splc.org/news/report_detail.asp?id=41&amp;edition=16" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.splc.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;report_detail.asp?id=41&amp;edition=16</a><p>Article from &#x27;97 when the judge dismissed the case as it was &quot;not defamatory&quot;: <a href="http://www.splc.org/news/report_detail.asp?id=136&amp;edition=14" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.splc.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;report_detail.asp?id=136&amp;edition=14</a>
ChrisNorstrom大约 11 年前
That&#x27;s why I always use &quot;_X_&quot; as placeholder text. At the very end of development I run a search for &quot;_X_&quot; on the templates&#x2F;files to see if I accidentally left any. Not only does it stand out visually but it&#x27;s very easy to run a search on without any false positives.
pionar大约 11 年前
An ATM I use frequently hasn&#x27;t been properly set up, so during the transaction, you&#x27;ll see things like &quot;[CONSUMER MESSAGE]&quot; and &quot;[NON-MEMBER FEE]&quot; and &quot;[EXIT MESSAGE HERE]&quot;. Makes me smile every time.
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Fishkins大约 11 年前
I know someone who used to work as a programmer in finance. One of his coworkers liked to use creative placeholders in his email templates. One day something went wrong with the placeholder substitution, and a bunch of their clients received emails starting, &quot;Dear ${rich_fat_bastard}&quot;. That guy&#x27;s career in finance didn&#x27;t last too long.
MichaelGG大约 11 年前
I learned this at 18, when after a particularly frustrating round of edits on some file, I sent it to my partner for review with a filename like &quot;fuckthiscustomer&quot;. He then forwarded it on, without reviewing.<p>Customer wasn&#x27;t pleased and demanded an explanation. Somehow my partner convinced them it was an email virus in their system. Still, lesson learned.
sharkweek大约 11 年前
So good -- I remember seeing one in the NYT when the George Zimmerman jury verdict was reached, that was just a XX&#x2F;XX&#x2F;XXXX in the date section. Assuming they had both articles written.<p>I suspect this will only become more and more common in the &quot;publish first, edit later&quot; evolving world of online journalism.
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narshe大约 11 年前
I worked at a place (but not on the team) where someone used the Ebonics (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_English" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;African_American_Vernacular_Eng...</a>) version of Lorem Ipsum to fill in a large amount of text on the app. They forgot about it and showed it to the client and it contained a lot f-bombs and n-words.<p>It seems like people need to learn the hard way to not put that stuff in. If it&#x27;s there, it&#x27;ll be accidentally shown to the wrong person.
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herokusaki大约 11 年前
...And this is why you never put insults in placeholder text!
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moron4hire大约 11 年前
It&#x27;s a testament to how much more software we could stand to develop, software that probably hasn&#x27;t even been touched, yet.<p>For a newspaper, obviously they need to have a parallel process to layout the paper and develop the content. Why don&#x27;t they have software now that &quot;compiles&quot; the paper from design files and content files and won&#x27;t release the copy until all of the content is marked as reviewed?<p>Or essentially, as the person is performing the layout for stuff like callouts, instead of generating their own placeholder content, they generate rules for the place holder content (just as they seem to be typing rules into the callout as the placeholder itself), and the system would both generate the placeholder for the designer, while also queuing the snippet of content for the writer.<p>Then, you just have to train your users &quot;never type in your own placeholder text.&quot; Use the queue as a project management tool. Editors could then review the text, mark it as reviewed, or re-enqueue it for rewriting. The article is done when the queue is done.<p>I mean, really, I&#x27;m not even describing anything revolutionary here. It&#x27;s BugZilla, Redmine, etc., just with a layout program tied to the fields in the database.<p>Would newspapers and magazines actually use something like that? Or is pigheaded entrenchment into old ways the disease of their industry that is leading them to die out?
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tzs大约 11 年前
Also funny is when error text makes it through. Back in the &#x27;80s, I&#x27;d occasionally see in the classified ads section of the Los Angeles Times ads that looked like this: &quot;FILE ID=18273 NOT FOUND&quot;.<p>The Lorem Ipsum text greatly confused me the first time I encountered it. That was in Apple Pages. I made a new document using a template, and it was full of that text. I didn&#x27;t realize it was meant to be nonsense. I assumed it was meant to be sensible sample text, and should have been English for people in the US, and therefore I must have somehow managed to screw up my internationalization settings somewhere and it was showing me some foreign language&#x27;s sensible placeholder instead.<p>I spent a long time trying to figure out how to change my settings to get the Enlish placeholder, before finally doing what I should have done in the first place, and Googling the actual text.
chris_wot大约 11 年前
One of the software products I worked on once forgot to take out test data from their reports. We got a support ticket asking what the report &quot;I can hear angels&quot; did.
dangravell大约 11 年前
I&#x27;m not convinced that last example wasn&#x27;t a winemaker looking for some fancy-looking latin to make his wine label look classier.
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jmnicolas大约 11 年前
Humans make mistakes and I&#x27;m glad we have those placeholders creating funny situations.<p>However I don&#x27;t put anything in my comments &#x2F; code that would reflect poorly on me or my company. A bit of humor is always refreshing, but vulgarity is a no no.
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theboss大约 11 年前
I&#x27;ve also experienced this. Recently I interviewed at a big tech company and when I received the original e-mail it said &quot;Hello NAME&quot; instead of my first name.<p>I asked if it was recruiter error or programmer error and never got a response.
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MadManE大约 11 年前
I found Lorem Ipsum on the side of a Chipotle bag not too long ago. I thought it had to have been satire, but now I realize that it&#x27;s just incompetence.
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greggman大约 11 年前
On the one hand you should cut people some slack. Content First = noob (okay, that&#x27;s probably unfair but...)<p>I&#x27;ve worked on projects with 300 + lines (yea, not many) but that had to be translated into 17 languages. That&#x27;s 5100 things that need to be checked. I know of games that with all the localization had over 40,000 dialog audio files (yes, that&#x27;s four zero k).<p><i>Content First</i> doesn&#x27;t work on big projects IMO. In fact with &quot;agile&quot; you won&#x27;t even know what content you need until you get there.<p>That said, with a little forethought it would certainly be possible to try to design some system so you could at least kind of auto verify that at least all your placeholder stuff has been replaced with something not placeholder. For example if you prefixed all placeholder text with &quot;PLACEHOLDER: &quot; and then had a script that would check. Could probably do similar things for audio files though it might be a little harder.<p>Unfortunately for people adding new text or audio if they forgot to follow the rules you&#x27;d have a hole. I suppose you could require first check in to follow the placeholder rules? Or maybe someone has a better idea<p>Now for a project I worked on. If you play the US Crash Team Racing (CTR) on PS1 and unlock Penta Penguin (IIRC), and then race with him you&#x27;ll hear &quot;test sound 1&quot; and &quot;test sound 2&quot;. I don&#x27;t remember how many sounds there are in CTR but Penta Penguin was only really in the game for the Japanese version which could only be unlocked by going to a promotional event and getting a special save stored on your memory card. So, being a relatively secret character no one play tested him in the USA and no one bothered to go over the 1000s of sound files to see which ones were still placeholders until after it shipped.
rmrfrmrf大约 11 年前
I mean, yeah, I&#x27;m sure these were all embarrassing at the time, but keeping in mind that newspapers are published <i>every single day</i>, you&#x27;re talking about an error rate that&#x27;s extremely low, relatively speaking.<p>I&#x27;m actually not seeing how <i>any</i> of these examples would have been helped by content-first design. Having the content first is just a <i>different</i> approach with its own unique set of issues (namely that you&#x27;ll be changing the content 700 times <i>during</i> the design process, which is actually a bit nightmarish when you&#x27;re passing data around). I wouldn&#x27;t call it better, though.
waylandsmithers大约 11 年前
I was an editor of a small print publication and this happened to me once. The caption below a photo was something like &quot;Please tell me this isn&#x27;t a stupid picture of XYZ&quot; (can&#x27;t remember what it was) as a joke to the copy editor who would eventually see it an laugh at how hilarious I was. Of course it slipped by because it just looked like a normal caption.<p>I&#x27;m not sure these examples advance this article&#x27;s point too far-- incidents like these could have been avoided by more clearly marking that the text was a placeholder.
kens大约 11 年前
I saw a padlock for sale with the packaging in English, French, and Spanish. Unfortunately they left Lorem Ipsum in place of some of the translations. This would be harder to spot than most non-replaced placeholders, even if someone is proofreading. (Latin is in the same Romance language family as English and French.)<p>Photo at <a href="http://www.righto.com/2009/11/lorem-ipsue-when-internationalization.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.righto.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;11&#x2F;lorem-ipsue-when-international...</a>
darklajid大约 11 年前
A very recent example: The newsletter announcing the blackphone (discussed here as well).<p>Upper left corner says:<p>Use this area to offer a short teaser of your email&#x27;s content. Text here will be shown in the preview area of some email clients&quot;.<p><a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1194203/Screenshot_2014-02-24-16-31-12.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.dropboxusercontent.com&#x2F;u&#x2F;1194203&#x2F;Screenshot_2014-...</a><p>Oops :)
aestra大约 11 年前
Funny enough I just found another one today.<p><a href="http://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/75793/1/cesifo_wp503.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.econstor.eu&#x2F;bitstream&#x2F;10419&#x2F;75793&#x2F;1&#x2F;cesifo_wp503....</a> [pdf]<p>all the figure placeholder text weren&#x27;t replaced and the figures are missing.<p>Figure 1 about here<p>Figure 2 about here<p>Figure 3 about here<p>...
helpermethod大约 11 年前
Remindes me of this: <a href="http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Don&#x27;t_Be_Cute_with_Your_Test_Data" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;programmer.97things.oreilly.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;Don&#x27;t_...</a>
scelerat大约 11 年前
&#x27;HED&#x27;, &#x27;LEDE&#x27;, &#x27;GRAF&#x27;, &#x27;DEK&#x27; and a number of other specialized spellings are often used for placeholders because they (theoretically) stand out for copy editors and spell checkers.
aestra大约 11 年前
Ok, I give up. Where is the placeholder text on the first newspaper? The 4th picture down, has &quot;A Push To Let Ryan Be Ryan&quot; as a heading.
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mikeleeorg大约 11 年前
Methinks it may be wise to add grepping for placeholder text as part of one&#x27;s build process.
interstitial大约 11 年前
Premise is silly. You want deadline-based newspaper designers to WAIT until all the stories and headlines are done - then design the paper. And get a paper out? I take it you internet junkies know nothing of the once enormous scope of journalism and the resource allocation necessary to accomplish it. Let me explain parallel process project management to you someday.
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benihana大约 11 年前
This is a reminder to all the junior developers (and some of the forgetful senior developers) as to why you <i>never</i> put anything in testing text that you don&#x27;t want the world to see. Having users see &quot;Fucking FuckBalls&quot; as placeholder instead of &quot;John Doe&quot; is alarming and will lead to quite the awkward discussion with your boss.
gcb0大约 11 年前
first job in early 90s doing website for huge newspaper. fill elections page with outrageous but real quotes from the campaign. editor assumes a few are good to go and publishes. major shitstorm. team makes a standard to only use ipsum lorem or Nononono.