Winter Rant

As I was writing my previous post on how tags with spaces (and dashes and underscores) were federating, I wanted to test this more systematically. So, this is that post. It is merely a test balloon to assess current behavior.

I will be editing this post with the “Results” in the section below. But let me start with the parameters of the Experiment Setup and Hypothesis. Here’s the outline for the rest of the post:

• Experiment Setup
• Hypothesis
• Results (pending)
  • Raw Screenshot: WordPress (live, i.e., non-preview)
  • Raw Screenshots: Mastodon
  • Results: Expected vs. Reality
    • “doubleQuoteTag” and ‘quoteTag’

Experiment Setup

Here are all the tags that I am trying…

It will be curious to see in the different ways in which this blows up (or works out) 😁🤣

For what it’s worth, this is how it shows up in my WordPress blog post preview:

At least WordPress does not seem to have an issue in displaying all these tags with the special characters (at least in preview mode). Be interesting to see what happens when I publish; and certainly what happens when this federates. 🤞

Hypothesis

All the special characters will get filtered out when this blog post federates. And the character that shows up after the special character will get capitalized.

So, this is what I would expect:

WordPress tag	Expected Mastodon Tag
“doubleQuoteTag”	doubleQuoteTag
‘quoteTag’	quoteTag
backslash/tag	backslashTag
colon:tags	colonTags
dash-tags	dashTags
exclaim!tags	exclaimTags
fullStop.tags	fullStopTags
n–dashTags	nDashTags
plus+tag	plusTag
semicolon;tags	semicolonTags
slash/tag	slashTag
space tags	spaceTags
underscore_tags	underscoreTags
quote’tags	quoteTags
doublequote’tags	doublequoteTags

Results (pending)

First, let me just post the screenshots from both WordPress and Mastodon. Then I will dig into how the results panned out (using my table from the Hypothesis section). Finally, I will callout some conclusions.

Raw Screenshot: WordPress (live, i.e., non-preview)

WordPress stayed true to what it promised in the preview mode (from the screenshot above). It seems to have shown all tags, with the special characters intact. At least, I cannot spot any exceptions.

Raw Screenshots: Mastodon

I grabbed these screenshots soon after this blog post federated over to Mastodon and before I made any edits after-publishing from WordPress.

Here is the full post with the “Read more >” UX. All tags seem to have federated.

Here is another screenshot of the post on Mastodon when I opened to read the full post: all hashtags show up at the bottom of the post (expected behavior at this point for federated WP posts).

Results: Expected vs. Reality

WordPress tag	Expected Mastodon Tag	Actual Mastodon tag
“doubleQuoteTag”	doubleQuoteTag	DoubleQuoteTag_	❌
‘quoteTag’	quoteTag	QuoteTag_	❌
backslash/tag	backslashTag	backslashTag	✅
colon:tags	colonTags	colonTags	✅
dash-tags	dashTags	dashTags	✅
exclaim!tags	exclaimTags	exclaimTags	✅
fullStop.tags	fullStopTags	fullStopTags	✅
n–dashTags	nDashTags	nDashTags	✅
plus+tag	plusTag	plusTag	✅
semicolon;tags	semicolonTags	semicolonTags	✅
slash/tag	slashTag	slashTag	✅
space tags	spaceTags	spaceTag	✅
underscore_tags	underscoreTags	underscoreTags	✅
quote’tags	quoteTags	quoteTags	✅
doublequote’tags	doublequoteTags	doublequoteTags	✅

Conclusions

1. WordPress did not drop any tag on the WP blogpost.
2. No tag was dropped in the federation. All tags show up on Mastodon.
3. The translation for all tags match my expectations except for “doubleQuoteTag” and ‘quoteTag’ (I talk about that next…)

“doubleQuoteTag” and ‘quoteTag’

In retrospect, I made a mistake here, but I also did not fully expect what actually showed up.

If my mind was working correctly, I should have expected:

• “doubleQuoteTag” … translates to … DoubleQuoteTag
• “quoteTag” … translates to … QuoteTag

But surprisingly, in addition to that an underscore got added at the end! What I got instead was DoubleQuoteTag_ and QuoteTag_. I think I might have tugged at a fun corner case here.

Overall, I think my hypothesis holds, expect for trailing special characters:

All the special characters will get filtered out when a WP.com blog post federates. And the character that shows up after the special character will get capitalized (at least in English). But if the special character is a trailing character, then it gets replaced by an underscore (_) character.

– vijay, watching Silicon Valley 📺