What is going on with this?
In: Technology
they are likely using a combination of non-american keyboards and non-standard browserss.
basically reddit cant properly import/convert/display the text from their device. so spaces/apostrophe and other special characters are not displayed properly from input to output
Poorly written bots are forgetting to decode “: ”
%3%20 is how those characters would appear in URLs, raw html and certain other strings where using the actual characters could cause errors.
In URL there are way to encode some characters for compatibility reasons [https://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.ASP](https://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.ASP)
%3A is ; and %20 is a space, so “ELI5: ” can be written as “ELI%3A%20” in some situations, this is often because : and space is not allowed, the are often used for control purposes.
For some reason, the browser, char set or something else results in an encoding that is not decoded by Reddits website.
So easy to explain why it is %3A%20 you get but harder to know why it happened and you get in instead of “: “
When you forget to start with “ELI5: ” you get an AutoModerator message saying the post is rejected *and* it has a link to resubmit with the “ELI5:” prefix, but that seems to not work out so well in the iOS app, where it becomes “ELI5%3A%20” instead.
EDIT: The link in the message is `https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/submit?title=ELI5%3A%20<the original title>`. Here you have the new post title “encoded” in the URL, which is sometimes needed in order for software (most notably browsers) to understand text with special characters in the URL properly. The app however, seems to forget to “decode” the new title and takes the characters as-is.
Bot posts.
[https://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp?_sm_au_=iVVDMg0TSmrMV6Dm](https://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp?_sm_au_=iVVDMg0TSmrMV6Dm)
%3A is a colon ( : )
%20 is a “space” (as in press spacebar)
I’d say for any top 1,000 subs of reddit that at least 50% of posts are made by bots and anywhere from 20-40% of comments are bots/AI/mining.
Youll notice that a third of all posts gets removed like a day or 2 after post is made and comments are entered. Reddit is mostly a massive data-mining and AI-training sandbox.
All of the hyper emotional stories “Am I the Asshole?!~?!?” type posts are to mine data on how humans respond to the most emotional of topics.
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