Finding $$anonymous$$ replacement text in old answers and comments

Unity Technologies gave their last f*ck about Unity Answers 2 years ago, after years of radio silence, don't expect anything to be fixed on this website :')

Comments cannot be edited by anyone but the original poster AFAIK. Questions and Answers can be edited though, but good luck editing all the posts

Actually I'm not sure what is causing this. What is strange that even some of my answers and comments do have those weird replacements as well. Though what's even weirder is that when you edit the post, the text that loads up does not have those replacements. When you just resave the post without any modification the issue is fixed. My guess would be that UA may have some cache server in front of the actual database and that server may be suspect to some kind of hacker manipulation. Those replacements have happend for at least 5 years.

Also most of the time single letters are replaced. Usually capital letters like "M" or "T". When this happend the first time I thought they shouldn't let practicants do search and replace actions on the database. Though since this happens up to this date it has to be something else. Maybe an automatic maintenance script that went havoc, who knows...

ps: There's a hacky trick to edit arbitrary comments by first converting them into an answer and then back to a comment. However that would sometimes break references between posts. UA is generally a bit unstable in this regard.

The number of bugs UA has has gone through the roof. Even the reported posts page has some strange typo bugs. For example pressing the "last post" button in the navigation will add a second ? at the end of the URL instead of a &. I can remember when there was a bug that using the double right arrow button on the reported page brought you back to the moderation queue because the link was missing the tab=reported. It looks like after years someone quickly added ?tab=reported to the button without ever testing it. Every time you want to view the latest reports you have to manually replace the ? with a & and the page loads correctly...

I was already thinking about creating a greasemonkey script to fix this, however I'm not that often on the reports page and I'm too lazy to dig into this at the moment -.-.

What's also funny, the URL contains a "sort" parameter set to "newest". Changing it to something else does not change the sorting at all. So the whole page is somewhat in an "under construction" state but the people who worked on it seem to have vanished years ago. It's really sad. I understand that they want to push their premium support, but leaving UA in this state is just unprofessional to say the least.

A really freaky thing is this also happens in forums. Forums doesn't even use the same software system or hosting company as Unity Answers (unless they do now).

At first I thought it was some kind of browser extension trying to replace everything. Then I found this question. I think at some point Unity servers were hacked or some dev who quit the job left "easter egg bomb" that exploded at some point.