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**Category:** Bug Reports\
**Created:** [December 21, 2020, 7:06am UTC](https://community.gemsofwar.com/t/news-contain-invalid-html-tags/67756 "2020-12-21T07:06:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 13\
**Page:** 1
**Author:**  [@gary\_dils](https://community.gemsofwar.com/u/gary_dils)\
**Post date:** [December 21, 2020, 7:06am UTC](https://community.gemsofwar.com/t/news-contain-invalid-html-tags/67756/1 "2020-12-21T07:06:56Z")
**Platform, device version and operating system:**
PC (but actually does not matter)
**Screenshot or image:**
`` being the culprit here, highlighted red
**What you were expecting to happen, and what actually happened:**
I am using the RSS to display a teaser of the news within my Discord bot. While parsing the HTML, I stumbled upon the above invalid tag ``, which cannot be properly understood by feed parsers, and thus is ommitted. This breaks formatting.
I expect the tag either to be `
` or `
`.
The official W3C validator also lists this as [an error](https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fgemsofwar.com%2Fweb-of-shadows%2F).
**How often does this happen? When did it begin happening?**
This is the second time that I am observing this.
**Steps to make it happen again**
1. Subscribe to [Gems of War](https://gemsofwar.com/feed/) with a RSS feed reader
2. Select today’s news ([Web Of Shadows](https://gemsofwar.com/web-of-shadows/))
3. Either: Apply a HTML to Markdown converter to the formatting _or_ just view the source of the website
4. Important newlines are missing now
**This is more a reminder for future news posts**. Please don’t mess up the HTML, so that the structure can be properly inferred and the post is not garbled upon arrival in Discord.
Cheers, Gary
//edit: while I posted this, a new [news article](https://gemsofwar.com/campaign-begins-phoenix-stone/) was posted, with the same problem as described.
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**Author:**  [@Saltypatra](https://community.gemsofwar.com/u/Saltypatra)\
**Post date:** [December 23, 2020, 12:11am UTC](https://community.gemsofwar.com/t/news-contain-invalid-html-tags/67756/2 "2020-12-23T00:11:39Z")
We haven;t changed our formatting, so this might be an issue with the client. Unfortunately this isn’t a bug that takes priority for fixing, so it may not be resolved for a while.
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**Author:**  [@gary\_dils](https://community.gemsofwar.com/u/gary_dils)\
**Post date:** [December 23, 2020, 7:20am UTC](https://community.gemsofwar.com/t/news-contain-invalid-html-tags/67756/3 "2020-12-23T07:20:06Z")
Hey Saltypatra, thanks for reporting. I checked this on manual downloads as well, so it’s not the client. The above screenshot was in fact taken from a browser window viewing the news.
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**Author:**  [@gary\_dils](https://community.gemsofwar.com/u/gary_dils)\
**Post date:** [February 17, 2021, 8:29am UTC](https://community.gemsofwar.com/t/news-contain-invalid-html-tags/67756/4 "2021-02-17T08:29:54Z")
Update: Not only does this still exist, but today there was a new case of invalid characters occurring, which even made your own news feed choke: `<3`. It was written plainly into the website’s HTML, which browsers will tolerate, even though it’s broken (screenshot 1, source code of [New Pet – – Gems of War](https://gemsofwar.com/new-pet-2/)) `//edit ironic side note: even the forum preview of the link chokes on the proper title...`
and in the feed, fetched from [Gems of War](https://gemsofwar.com/feed/), it is completeley scrubbed from existence, screenshot 2, title of the feed, `–` is a dash:
expected contents: `New Pet – <3 (Nintendo Switch)`
In total, the news feed is chopped off at the invalid character, so you can’t even see whether this is PC or Switch news.
Cheers, Gary.
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**Author:**  [@gary\_dils](https://community.gemsofwar.com/u/gary_dils)\
**Post date:** [March 27, 2021, 7:30am UTC](https://community.gemsofwar.com/t/news-contain-invalid-html-tags/67756/5 "2021-03-27T07:30:33Z")
Half off-topic:
The bounty news for this weekend is completely weird. Everything is fine with Hound of Yao Guai, but the other one has a couple of mistakes:
- The title does not indicate Nintendo Switch, so going to [https://gemsofwar.com/news/](https://gemsofwar.com/news/) gives you unclear information about the platform (also my bot can’t tell, so PC players got two posts, Switch players got none)
- The Ice Wraith posting for Switch has mixed content: Both Ice Wraith and Ogress are mentioned, and a picture of Ogress is showing: 
- Needless to say that the broken html tags are still in there: 
Cheers, Gary.
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**Author:**  [@Saltypatra](https://community.gemsofwar.com/u/Saltypatra)\
**Post date:** [March 30, 2021, 5:03am UTC](https://community.gemsofwar.com/t/news-contain-invalid-html-tags/67756/6 "2021-03-30T05:03:39Z")
> [@gary\_dils](#):
>
> The bounty news for this weekend is completely weird. Everything is fine with Hound of Yao Guai, but the other one has a couple of mistakes:
>
> - The title does not indicate Nintendo Switch, so going to [Latest News – Gems of War](https://gemsofwar.com/news/) gives you unclear information about the platform (also my bot can’t tell, so PC players got two posts, Switch players got none)
> - The Ice Wraith posting for Switch has mixed
Thanks for letting me know!
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**Author:**  [@gary\_dils](https://community.gemsofwar.com/u/gary_dils)\
**Post date:** [April 10, 2021, 7:29am UTC](https://community.gemsofwar.com/t/news-contain-invalid-html-tags/67756/7 "2021-04-10T07:29:38Z")
thank you, this seems to be fixed now, marking it accordingly.
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**Author:**  [@gary\_dils](https://community.gemsofwar.com/u/gary_dils)\
**Post date:** [April 13, 2023, 6:37pm UTC](https://community.gemsofwar.com/t/news-contain-invalid-html-tags/67756/8 "2023-04-13T18:37:24Z")
This issue has resurfaced, and is not fixed. Last found in here (2023-04-09): [On the Right Track (Nintendo Switch) – Gems of War](https://gemsofwar.com/on-the-right-track-nintendo-switch/)
Cheers, Gary.
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**Author:**  [@gary\_dils](https://community.gemsofwar.com/u/gary_dils)\
**Post date:** [May 2, 2023, 6:52am UTC](https://community.gemsofwar.com/t/news-contain-invalid-html-tags/67756/9 "2023-05-02T06:52:45Z")
Hi,
sorry for loitering around in this thread, but the problem does not only persist with re-used Switch news posts, but also with freshly created ones, see [Campaign Begins: Aravatar’s Skull – Gems of War](https://gemsofwar.com/campaign-begins-aravatars-skull/)
And again, even the forum does not show up the usual preview, because the HTML is _broken_ and _invalid_. Further proof for this, other than my word, and the red highlighting from any browser’s source code view is the official [W3C validator results](https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fgemsofwar.com%2Fcampaign-begins-aravatars-skull%2F). There you can see that the document does not validate to be a working HTML5 page.
It’s not unlikely that this also brings a proper SEO impact to your overall site.
Cheers, Gary.
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**Author:**  [@Kafka](https://community.gemsofwar.com/u/Kafka)\
**Post date:** [May 3, 2023, 12:55am UTC](https://community.gemsofwar.com/t/news-contain-invalid-html-tags/67756/10 "2023-05-03T00:55:46Z")
Sorry, I thought I’d replied here. This is on the list but with the game updates at the moment it is not at the top of the list. We will look at it as soon as we’re able.
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**Author:**  [@TheGrinch](https://community.gemsofwar.com/u/TheGrinch)\
**Post date:** [May 3, 2023, 2:33am UTC](https://community.gemsofwar.com/t/news-contain-invalid-html-tags/67756/11 "2023-05-03T02:33:51Z")
Not to be disrespectful, but Gary is a well know member and contributor to this community. Also super tech savvy. Telling him it takes more than a few minutes to fix some extra HTML tags is… well, insulting?
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**Author:**  [@gary\_dils](https://community.gemsofwar.com/u/gary_dils)\
**Post date:** [May 3, 2023, 9:15am UTC](https://community.gemsofwar.com/t/news-contain-invalid-html-tags/67756/12 "2023-05-03T09:15:34Z")
> [@TheGrinch](#):
>
> Not to be disrespectful, but Gary is a well know member and contributor to this community. Also super tech savvy.
Thank you 🙂
> [@TheGrinch](#):
>
> Telling him it takes more than a few minutes to fix some extra HTML tags is… well, insulting?
I don’t take that as an insult. I know that the “fix” itself might only take a few seconds, but there is a whole business process around it. I feel like I should elaborate on what this usually looks like (though I can’t speak for IP2 / 505 in particular, I think it’s somewhat similar).
Lean back, and let me tell you the story of a very quick change on the website of a random company.
_The website is hosted on an ancient instance of Wordpress. Before you can even think of changing something, you need to find the contact within the company who is able to provide a login to the backend, where changes can be done. Sometimes this even lies within a 3rd party company, as this is seldomly self hosted._
_But either way, once you gain access to the backend, you’ll quickly find that there is only content there, no actual source code. The broken source code is stored within either a plugin, or a theme / template within the backend, that needs to be first identified, and subsequently changed and patched. Now with Wordpress you have the challenge that many of the plugin / theme authors mix content with PHP source code. So you can’t just move in and change something, because it could break the surroundings - in particular if the resulting broken code is somehow generated through the PHP._
_So what to do now? You clone the Wordpress instance, patch that, test it properly, then move back the changes into the real website._
_Yes the actual change takes only 10 seconds, but the whole above ordeal gets you busy for days before this is finally fixed. All including running around and finding people who can get you to the next step, and while maybe not even having PHP developers on the team._
TLDR; So all that Kafka told me was the priority of this compared to other stuff that could be done within the same timeframe is lower. She managed my expectations of “hey this could be done within the hour” to “it can take some longer before we pick it up”, which is good, because now I will stay patient for a while.
Hope that sheds some light on why I don’t see that as insulting.
Cheers, Gary.
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**Author:**  [@TheGrinch](https://community.gemsofwar.com/u/TheGrinch)\
**Post date:** [May 3, 2023, 8:55pm UTC](https://community.gemsofwar.com/t/news-contain-invalid-html-tags/67756/13 "2023-05-03T20:55:45Z")
Totally can resonate with your story 😉 Seen it many times, see it daily still.
Insulting- probl was a wrong choice of words 😉 However, i would think their source code is a bit more tight. If i try to start imagining their code looking that bad that they can’t change a simple html tag, oh well, then i can understand some of the other bugs that are coming back sometimes or introduced randomly every know an then.