What happens when placeholder text doesn’t get replaced

"Emma, please insert NMR data here! where are they? and for this compound, just make up an elemental analysis…"

Here is a link the supplementary information where the quote is located on page 12. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/om4000067/suppl_file/o...

As a joke, someone referred to Coach Wilson on a pull quote as "head coach of the Columbia football team until Monday morning". This was supposed to be removed before print, but nobody caught it.

To make matters worse, the coach actually was fired that weekend (not even 24 hours after the team had its only win of the season)! That led to an incredibly awkward retraction: ("This was a joke, and we're sorry... but apparently we were right, even though we didn't know it"[1])

This sort of stuff goes on in newsrooms all the time. I'm actually surprised that these mistakes don't happen more often, given how common these are, and given that most copy-editing happens in the wee hours of the morning, fueled by caffeine and sleep deprivation.

[0] Don't have time to scan through the PDFs of the printed versions (IIRC it was only in the printed version), but it was one of these articles: http://www.columbiaspectator.com/tags/norries-wilson

[1] I was on the board of the paper at the time, so I can confirm that we actually didn't have prior knowledge of this - it really was just a very amusingly-timed joke.

Somehow everybody (proofreader(s), author(s), etc.) ended missing that and the bogus screenshot and that legend made it to the final, printed, version of the book : )

I've taken that as a warning and never write anything I wouldn't be happy for a customer to see in logs, test-data, comments (although handfuls of sarcasm are still acceptable) or debugging code.

https://mobile.twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/14082734075741798...

  # COPY_REQUIRED

Similarly, I do a fair amount of presentations, and I always put in huge red letters a note to update the metrics, provide a source, etc. It's hard to miss when doing a final flip-through.

For a while the first hit in Google's image search for QR Code was a code for a person's personal site which he'd put up as a test and by happenstance got picked up by a few places which a few other places picked it up from and so forth. All fine when you are explaining QR codes and are fine pushing people to some random but currently inoffensive site, but a number of places used it up as a placeholder in adversing campaigns then forgot to replace it with one representing the real URL before going to print.

The owner of the page knew what had happened as he had offers to rent or buy the URL, demands that he turn it over when he didn't want to, and even threats of being sued for "hacking our advertising". IIRC he never "sold the URL" instead leaving his personal page in place. He had the good grace not to add something offensive to the page, which I'm sure I would have done after receiving any such demand or threat. I would have least published a list of the fools that fell into the "trap" with a copy of relevant correspondence (sanitised to remove names and such).

Fortunately the text was bilingual and I doubt there are many Welsh who don't speak English...

Article from '96 on the filing: http://www.splc.org/news/report_detail.asp?id=41&edition=16

Article from '97 when the judge dismissed the case as it was "not defamatory": http://www.splc.org/news/report_detail.asp?id=136&edition=14

Customer wasn't pleased and demanded an explanation. Somehow my partner convinced them it was an email virus in their system. Still, lesson learned.

I suspect this will only become more and more common in the "publish first, edit later" evolving world of online journalism.

It seems like people need to learn the hard way to not put that stuff in. If it's there, it'll be accidentally shown to the wrong person.

For a newspaper, obviously they need to have a parallel process to layout the paper and develop the content. Why don't they have software now that "compiles" the paper from design files and content files and won't release the copy until all of the content is marked as reviewed?

Or essentially, as the person is performing the layout for stuff like callouts, instead of generating their own placeholder content, they generate rules for the place holder content (just as they seem to be typing rules into the callout as the placeholder itself), and the system would both generate the placeholder for the designer, while also queuing the snippet of content for the writer.

Then, you just have to train your users "never type in your own placeholder text." Use the queue as a project management tool. Editors could then review the text, mark it as reviewed, or re-enqueue it for rewriting. The article is done when the queue is done.

I mean, really, I'm not even describing anything revolutionary here. It's BugZilla, Redmine, etc., just with a layout program tied to the fields in the database.

Would newspapers and magazines actually use something like that? Or is pigheaded entrenchment into old ways the disease of their industry that is leading them to die out?

The Lorem Ipsum text greatly confused me the first time I encountered it. That was in Apple Pages. I made a new document using a template, and it was full of that text. I didn't realize it was meant to be nonsense. I assumed it was meant to be sensible sample text, and should have been English for people in the US, and therefore I must have somehow managed to screw up my internationalization settings somewhere and it was showing me some foreign language's sensible placeholder instead.

I spent a long time trying to figure out how to change my settings to get the Enlish placeholder, before finally doing what I should have done in the first place, and Googling the actual text.

However I don't put anything in my comments / code that would reflect poorly on me or my company. A bit of humor is always refreshing, but vulgarity is a no no.

I asked if it was recruiter error or programmer error and never got a response.

I've worked on projects with 300 + lines (yea, not many) but that had to be translated into 17 languages. That's 5100 things that need to be checked. I know of games that with all the localization had over 40,000 dialog audio files (yes, that's four zero k).

Content First doesn't work on big projects IMO. In fact with "agile" you won't even know what content you need until you get there.

That said, with a little forethought it would certainly be possible to try to design some system so you could at least kind of auto verify that at least all your placeholder stuff has been replaced with something not placeholder. For example if you prefixed all placeholder text with "PLACEHOLDER: " and then had a script that would check. Could probably do similar things for audio files though it might be a little harder.

Unfortunately for people adding new text or audio if they forgot to follow the rules you'd have a hole. I suppose you could require first check in to follow the placeholder rules? Or maybe someone has a better idea

Now for a project I worked on. If you play the US Crash Team Racing (CTR) on PS1 and unlock Penta Penguin (IIRC), and then race with him you'll hear "test sound 1" and "test sound 2". I don't remember how many sounds there are in CTR but Penta Penguin was only really in the game for the Japanese version which could only be unlocked by going to a promotional event and getting a special save stored on your memory card. So, being a relatively secret character no one play tested him in the USA and no one bothered to go over the 1000s of sound files to see which ones were still placeholders until after it shipped.

I'm actually not seeing how any of these examples would have been helped by content-first design. Having the content first is just a different approach with its own unique set of issues (namely that you'll be changing the content 700 times during the design process, which is actually a bit nightmarish when you're passing data around). I wouldn't call it better, though.

I'm not sure these examples advance this article's point too far-- incidents like these could have been avoided by more clearly marking that the text was a placeholder.

Photo at http://www.righto.com/2009/11/lorem-ipsue-when-international...

Upper left corner says:

Use this area to offer a short teaser of your email's content. Text here will be shown in the preview area of some email clients".

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1194203/Screenshot_2014-...

Oops :)

http://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/75793/1/cesifo_wp503.... [pdf]

all the figure placeholder text weren't replaced and the figures are missing.

Figure 1 about here

Figure 2 about here

Figure 3 about here

...