Certain characters and groups of characters get replaced with "$$Anonymous$$"

If I type the word tea or K in the forum it will replace it with $$anonymous$$

I think it only works with replies.

 

tea K or not

 

It's retroactive, as well, and in Unity Answers. I've noticed that years-old comments of mine in UA have rare garbage $$anonymous$$ in them, and I know they were fine when I wrote them. Do UA and Forums even use the same system?

 

tea K or not?

Keto?

OP has these two posts, how do they know how thread replies they write show up?

 

I see that too. It's really weird. "Instead" becomes "ins$$anonymous$$d".

 

Chiming in here because I've been running into this, too. Just noticed it over the past couple of days. I've seen it for capital K and capital M, as well as the string "tea" as stated above.

In fact, if you search in Google for answers.unity.com "$$anonymous$$" it will give you loads of results, including this thread, strangely enough.

https://answers.unity.com/questions/1398512/shift-tab.html
https://answers.unity.com/questions/934527/ui-button-click-through-keyboardcode.html

 

Can also confirm this, very weird.

 

Is there a fix for this or somewhere to post it as an official bug needing a fix?

 

I've stumbled upon posts from ~2014 with "$$anonymous$$" instead of "m".

 

Apparently the letter "m" is replaced with $$anonymous$$ on old replies.

 

Search Google with the following, and you'll get about 64,300 results all containing "$$anonymous$$".

• site:unity3d.com "$$anonymous$$"

The oldest posts and comments that I found with the issue date back to October 2009, such as this one: https://answers.unity.com/questions/7577/can-i-use-unitygui-to-make-a-3d-gui.html

 

This is a recent issue. Very annoying, I am looking at a comment I made myself in a reply to a problem I was having, and back then I was very thankful. Now, the same comment is very difficult to read.

But editing my comment shows all the text is the same as original. Weird.

 

Yeah this is starting to drive me nuts too. I wonder if its the hacker group anonymous. Because why else would random posts be screwed up.

 

Glad to know it's not just me seeing this very annoying behavior. Can someone responsible for the Unity Forum chime in here?

 

any news?

 

With Unity Answers, where this issue also occurs, the problem was that it was run by a 3rd party. For any change or problem the Unity3D person had to request something from them which they may or may not understand and may or mat not do. And it was a lengthy process either way.

 

blank answers…
https://answers.unity.com/questions/189577/drag-and-drop-files-into-unity3d-window.html

 

But that seems like a simple database problem. They grab all the headings and metadata from one table, then try to grab to contents, which is stored elsewhere, and fail. It's also just a Unity Answers problem. The weird thing about $$anonymous$$ is it affects Forums and UA, which makes no sense (different providers, last I heard) and seems like a buggy feature, not just a glitch.

 

Still no progression? It is more then half of a year and I still stumble over this annoying issue a lot. That is quite embarrassing.

 

I reported this issue on January 9, 2021.

The response I received from a Unity Technologies customer service engineer stated that it's a known issue, but not something they can fix at this time. It also stated that they're in the process of migrating the Answers site over to their new system, and that there was no implementation timeframe, but that the issue would be resolved.

 

Found this after googling the term "$$anonymous$$". Really annoying having to figure out what people are saying in posts since they are all filled with this text. I've been doing a lot of searching today and have run across this issue on most pages I've read, both new and old.

Some kind of confirmation from Unity would be nice. Hopefully it's something that can be fixed.

 

Hi everyone!
I made a userscript that gets rid of $$anonymous$$ tokens.
Basically it replaces any found $$anonymous$$ token with the most obvious original word.
Here is a link to the repo with some instructions on installation.
https://github.com/murphyne/unity-answers-anonymous

 

Bump. Had this problem for around a half-year, but only now decided to ask google. So, I'm here, and what I should do?.. Hello, a random guy below!

 

$$anonymous$$ is a bug.
"M", "tea" and sometimes "K" can get mistakely replaced with "$$anonymous$$".

Code (CSharp):

1. Mathf.Min();

That sample line of code can become "$$anonymous$$athf.$$anonymous$$in();" some day.
I think that Unity is trying to fix the bug.

 

I've only seen this on UA. We have a meta question over there as well (also check the comments). Note that it seems that the actual content is not changed. At least on UA, when I edit the post the original text shows up. Just hitting save again fixed the issue. So it somehow looks like some sort of corrupted cache?!? Though since this happend years back and is still happening I would guess it's either a scriptkiddy that somehow got access to the database, or it's some sort of misconfigured script that performs some automatic actions on the database.

 

Bump.

The fact that a user sooner made a custom script to solve a problem that Unity should fix is appaling. On Unity's side

 

Can't believe this hasn't been fixed yet.

 

Unity PLEASE, a year already? Are you abandoning Unity Answers? Is it dead?

 

Since this thread got bumped again, I'd just like to add that this doesn't look like an issue in the actual database but somewhere infront of it. Something in the loadbalancer / cache.

As others have already mentioned, when you actually edit a post with those mangled text, the text that loads in the editor is actually the original text without any of those replacements. When you just hit save again without changing anything, that post will show up correctly.

So it looks like the cache somehow get messed up (maybe some automatic maintenance scripts?). If Unity or the provider does not have any such scripts anywhere, I would assume the load balancer / cache may be affected by a hacker. If that's the case, Unity and / or the provider should be more than concerned.

Since I have moderator rights on UA I could edit most posts to fix this (only questions and answers, no comments besides my own). However editing and re-saving such posts would naturally bump the question which is sub-optimal. As it was already mentioned, even ancient questions that are dead or outdated are affected as well. Editing those would bring them to the top for no reason. That's why I generally avoid fixing such posts besides my own (and even those only if they are still relevant).

@UnityMaru It would be great to get some kind of feedback. We had already a META question on UA about that. In the comments I mentioned a few other issues that we have to deal with for ages...

 

Still happening.
I was browsing Unity Answer and:
https://answers.unity.com/questions/767646/materialpropertyblock-main-texture-offset.html

That's pretty alarming to still see this around.
I'm even considering to use a browser plugin to replace those with an M.

That replacement doesn't sound "serious" from a technical standpoint.
So... maybe it *is* serious and the whole database is corrupted beyond repair?

What are new users going to think when they see that?

 

A year later and this is still an issue? Come on Unity web team

 

Thanks for the fix. This $$anonymous$$ problem was at the back of my mind for over a year now, but I didn't get around to looking it up til today.

Honestly wouldn't be surprised if Answers gets deprecated in the future, but it still contains a wealth of knowledge from years past that comes up instantly on google search, so IMO it's worth installing the script even if you don't plan on posting.

 

October 21, 2021 and I'm still seeing this issue all over the place. Any update?

Here's a sample post : https://answers.unity.com/questions/1142958/buttonselect-doesnt-highlight.html

 

THANKS!

 

2022...

 

Is this really that impossible to solve?

 

Still happening. What? Is it really impossible or they forgot about this?

 

Wtf is this issue, how does this even happen? Another display of incompetence..

 

This also makes it rather difficult to read some of the answers. I would chalk it up to a regex bug somewhere... I'm really surprised it even made it into production. I've also seen capital M replaced with $$anonymous$$.

 

Apparently the site was hacked, and the cache was corrupted https://forum.unity.com/threads/cer...-replaced-with-anonymous.960722/#post-7425920

 

Into the second year now, and every day Unity broadcasts to thousands of developers that they just don't care that their (branded!) website looks like a scam-site. Hmm.

 

Thanks - installed with TamperMonkey and working very well. Very useful too to see a light and unobtrusive red underline on the replacements, in case there are any false-positives and you aren't sure what has happened.

 

Anonymous probably hacked them and that's why they can't fix it. Maybe now that anonymous has shifted their focus away from unity answers and on to Russia, the unity answers people will be able fix the unity answers problems.

 

I don't know about that. It seems much more likely to be a parsing bug related to a textual representation of an "anonymous" function. Let's not mix any urban legend into this forum?

 

still a problem today.... please get if fixed

 

Still encountering this. If the previous posts are correct and you can literally just edit and re-save your comments to fix the issue, then this should be hilariously simple to fix. Like it's merely a re-cache or something right?

Once again, the common Unity user to the rescue to fix Unity's mess. Thanks for this.

 

Bump, this is ages old and seems insane that nothing's been done. Makes the learning experience less approachable.

 

There is no actual hacker group named "Anonymous" that is literally what everyone is known as on 4chan, which a lot of hackers tend to browse that thread hence how the name came about... but there is no actual OFFICIAL real group. I highly doubt any of that has anything to do with this.

 

How has this not been fixed yet??