“Invisible” code spreading, changing website!?

This is my own, immediate update. My post above should only have bold for the words “become bold” in the second line – that is all I bolded, and I saw the opening and closing code/tags. Yet you can see how almost the entire post is bold (no idea why the 5 words starting with “Despite” are not bold like the rest).

EXPERIMENT: I’m going to now bold only the word “burrito” in this last line, and let’s see what happens: let’s all throw a burrito at the evil which is screwing up my website.

You have missing closing </strong> tags that are causing the bold problems: [Invalid]Markup Validation of civillawyeronline.com – W3C Markup Validator. Scroll down in the validation report to see line numbers and source code. Use the html editor tab in wordpress to see the code.

Thank you very much, SongDogTech, for your effort and suggestions – I shall explore this. At first glance of the Markup Validation, I see the errors – but none of these ‘errors’ show up/are viewable when I am looking at the code within WordPress. So I don’t see how I can ‘fix’ what I can’t see/what doesn’t exist in any viewable format within my pages.

I’m not an expert at this, by any means, but when I view the code via the WordPress page editor, all of the tags DO have closing tags. In fact, my sidebar has no bolding code at all (and never did) yet has also transformed into all bold. Similarly, I created a page last night, inserted zero text code commands (no bold, no italics, no underline, etc.) and it was all bold.

Then, there is the issue of my links starting out normal/as written/as intended (encompassing 1 or 2 words, generally) and then somehow extending to encompass full paragraphs.

All this, plus my original WordPress Forum posting above having random bolding . . . what the heck? Could this be viral?

See, the posting above by me, I did NOT bold the words “tags DO having closing”, but there they are, bolded!

If you look at the *source code* of your site and the source code at the bottom of the validation report, you will see that you are missing a closing </strong> tag in your text widget in the sidebar that begins “General Legal Advice…” You added that text widget and the links it in, and that’s where the error is. And that is cascading down and bolding everything else on your page.

As for the bolding in your text in this forum, you *are* adding the bolding yourself, probably by cutting and pasting text into the text box here on the forum.

I suspect you have a theme issue, in that you have an opening bold or strong tag somewhere in the header that isn’t properly closed, and is leaking into your entries.

Thanks, everyone.

SongDogTech, I do PROMISE you I am not cutting and pasting at all, and I did not, in any way, add any text commands in this post or the previous ones. That previous post and this one were written with nothing but regular weight and font original text with the exception of one word in all caps in each. (Not trying to argue, just communicating that I really am not doing anything.)

MrMist, that makes sense to me (as a non-expert) and I will look into it. Not sure if that ’cause’ would be consistent with the issues that SongDogTech found when he ran the MarkUp Validator.

Will be interesting to see if this post contains any bolding once I hit “post” – right now, as I look at it, there is none, and I did not cut and paste, etc.

Oh, and SongDogTech, just to clarify (my fault), the left sidebar (sidebar 1) is supposed to be bold the whole way. It’s the right sidebar (sidebar 2) which wasn’t bold, isn’t supposed to be bold, and has no bolding in the code when I view it via WordPress. It “bolded itself” a day or two ago.

(Again, this post contains original text with no formatting code commands.)

I said earlier that

… you are missing a closing tag in your text widget in the sidebar that begins “General Legal Advice…” You added that text widget and the links it in, and that’s where the error is. And that is cascading down and bolding everything else on your page.

I just went to the trouble of dumping your html into localhost, added the missing </strong> tag, and what a surprise, your page text is no longer bold. So fix the missing </strong> in your text widget.

The bolding in this forum is a different animal and isn’t important at this point.

Hey, Song, sorry if you are frustrated with me, I know you’re trying to help. What I was trying to say is that the sidebar beginning “General Legal Advice” IS supposed to have the unclosed <strong> tag – that sidebar is supposed to be all bold and always has been.

The sidebar beginning with “Wills, Trusts” is an example of an area which
converted to all bold, despite me not adding any such tags and no <bold> code being present/seen via the WordPress page editor.

(again, my post above has randomly bolded part of itself – that’s never happened before today, and seems like it can’t be a coincidence, given what’s going on with the website)

I know “General Legal Advice” is supposed to be bold; there’s a starting bold (<strong>) tag there. What you’re not understanding is that because the bold end tag (</strong>) is missing after the Legal Analysis link, everything else on the page goes bold.

The reason why some of the words in your posts are going bold in this forum is because you’re typing in a strong tag as an example and it’s going bold, because you’re not escaping the code with backticks or the code button to prevent it from being rendered in html as bold.

again, my post above has randomly bolded part of itself – that’s never happened before today, and seems like it can’t be a coincidence, given what’s going on with the website)

As songdogtech said, your posts aren’t randomly emboldening themselves. You’re typing <strong> in them, which is being picked up by the markup reader (as you can see in the text below the input box here strong is an allowed markup tag).

If you read back through your posts here, (except the one I fixed above), you’ll see that whereever you have typed <strong> it’s been magically emboldened.

Good points regarding the bolding in the posts, an obviously stupid thing on my end . . . except why didn’t that unclosed bold enbolden the rest of the post, instead of just one word or a few words?

SongDogTech, I now understand what you are saying, and apologize for not getting it earlier; thanks for your patience in explaining. Your thought makes sense, although it seems odd that this “bleed over” to the rest of the page content never occurred until a few days ago. I shall attempt to correct the problem you’ve identified forthwith and report back.

Thanks again.

This worked – and made my day. Thank you so much.

I suppose that, before recent WP and theme updates, the unclosed tags were being cut off by the end of the sidebar and were not ‘bleeding over’ to impact the rest of the code, but that appears to have changed.

A lesson learned.