Well in this case a post contained 20K whitespaces, so I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that it was a mistake rather than intentional.
A shitty Belkin KVM in certain configurations can allow this to happen.
There's a bug which keeps generating chr(32) characters when you activate the keyboard shortcut (scroll lock twice), and try to switch to another machine.
It will keep pumping out those spaces on whatever fields was selected at the time, so if you take your time before you switch back, you are going to be in for a lot of fun.
Haven't read the link yet, but wanted to share this sooner than later.
I've got of course checks in place that warn about trailing spaces and my Git hooks outright refuse a commit with trailing spaces. But it would be nice to catch that at the insert level.
You know, it may be cat who's typing.
autocmd BufWritePre * :%s/\s\+$//e
Then copy the entire post and paste it a couple dozen times.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4606984/maximum-number-o...
See the edit: http://stackoverflow.com/revisions/38484433/2
> The malformed post contained roughly 20,000 consecutive
> characters of whitespace on a comment line that started
> with -- play happy sound for player to enjoy. For us,
> the sound was not happy.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q="play+happy+sound+for+player+to+enjoy"+site%3Astackoverflow.comHahaha
Mine does that on the Control key all the time.
[0] eBay insists on something being entered and when it was a routine transaction with a vendor I seldom have anything useful to say.
But I do know that tools often make it easy for people do incredibly stupid things by accident. Like the 'sudo remove file' command followed by '-rf' in the wrong place. I rimraf a lot; it's very useful. It's a miracle I haven't wiped out any computers doing so...