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by smashed 1694 days ago
I was intrigued by your meta example and I took a look. It took me 3-4 minutes to find the warning, and I was looking for it!

I was expecting a big fat warning on the merge request itself, or maybe on the lines containing the dangerous chars.

In the end, it is a small ? character inserted were the unicode control chars are, and a mouseover tooltip warning about a potential issue.

The warning is good, but why so subtle? Sorry for the criticism. The feature is still a huge positive.

1 comments

Thanks for the feedback! Our primary use-case when deciding on it was to flag these up in a code-review situation, to prevent malicious content being submitted in merge requests to unsuspecting projects. We found this made it stand out enough to the reviewer when performing code reviews. I also try to not be too quick to add new alerts or sections to the GUI as we sometimes get criticised for having too much clutter D:

GitHub by comparison went down the alert banner route, from what I can see. I'm not opposed to adding something to that effect as well though - especially for inexperienced reviewers, it would be nice to include some more information about the potential exploit. That could be something we revisit when we add the homoglyph highlighting.

Thus, one sloppy review by that known tired-in-the-mornings dev, "sure thing, looks like Java..", and your little marking is missed?