### Common Issue 0006

Author:    Artex (aka: IceDragon)
Timestamp: 04.Oct.2005 @ 2105

Relation:  Helpers
Section:   Client
Title:     Missing text

Description:
    This problem has a wide variety of cases, but all of them have exactly the same concept: some
    particular text in the user's chatbox doesn't seem to show - either these are emits, whispers,
    system messages, chats or what ever. The user claims to be ignoring noone or noone that would
    somehow trigger the ignore system against the particular text that doesn't show.

Problem:
    As much as this seems to be a bug of some sort, this is nothing but a simple user error. As
    much as they claim to be ignoring noone, as much as their ignore list is "empty", it is still
    their fault and by the looks of things, they don't know what did they do wrong.

Solution:
    Whether the user tells us or not - there's a very good chance for this case to be a simple
    misuse of the ignore feature and this would be the first thing for us to check. The ignore
    system in Furcadia works like this: any text that comes through to your client is checked
    against your ignore entries. If the beginning of the text matches any of the ignore entries,
    the entire line of text is plain discarded, meaning you could easily ignore any system message
    by ignoring "[=]", ignore any dream emits by ignoring "[*]" or all these along with whispers
    by ignoring "[". Same thing happens with names, where anything said or emoted by, say, Artex
    will be ignored as well as anything said or emoted by Arthas if you type "ignore Ar". This
    is most likely our problem.
    
    First thing to do here is to ask the user to list their active ignores by saying "list ignores".
    Once the list is printed on their chatbox, they are to check if there are any entries that
    could match the beginning of the lines of text that appear to be missing. For instance, if they
    have a problem seeing "Artex: Message goes here", they are to look for an entry such as "Art"
    or even "A", since those will affect that particular line of text. If they claim they didn't
    find anything relevant, it's a good idea to check for them by asking what entries do they have
    there and what text doesn't show. Yes, it will look like mistrust in user's abilities to find
    errors, but let's not forget that the main point in this is to find the problem and correct it -
    better safe than sorry. If no problems seem to be found, suggest the user to perform an ignore
    list purge (can be done by saying "ignore off") and see if it helped. If it did, there must've
    been an entry there afterall!
    
    In case and the ignore list is empty and we still seem to be ignoring text for some reason,
    next step would be to check for proxy interference. Some proxies might have their own ignore
    systems implemented and they may have their own ignore list somewhere. Here you are to check
    if the user runs on a proxy or not. If they do, suggest them to connect directly and check if
    the problem is still there. Even if you've got enough experience with the proxy in question
    and are sure it shouldn't interfere, it is still a good idea to check if the problem remains
    once connected directly - the proxy may have bugs, too, y'know. Note that once reconnected,
    the ignores we've purged may have returned! The client reads the static ignores (placed in the
    configuration utility) as it starts and restores them. If the ignore entries came back and the
    problem didn't go away, try purging the list again.
    
    If after the entire procedure, at the point where the user is not using a proxy, has their
    ignore list completely empty, the problem still remains, this may indeed be a client-side bug!
    At this point, if you are out of ideas on how to correct the problem, you would probably want
    to transfer the call to the bugge hunters (make sure to let them know that you went through
    this procedure because, for they might repeat these steps - rather wasteful). If you /are/ a
    bugge hunter, you will probably know what to do from this point... ;)