So, I know we're not meant to earn gold in the test forum. That makes perfect sense... but I thought I should bring it to someone's attention that you can earn negative gold.

I've noticed several times that my gold would go down slightly after posting there, but I couldn't figure out what was going on or if it was my imagination... until today. I know for a fact that I had over 2000g this morning, but then after working on formatting for an upcoming thread, I was down to 1997.80.

A little testing found the root of the issue. Apparently, while using plain text has no effect, using any kind of formatting does! As proof, I had 1997.80g before I posted a random quote in this post, and after I posted it I had 1997.39g. In otherwords, using bbcode costs gold there.

This isn't much of a problem, except that testing formatting stuff is pretty much what that forum is meant for, which means we're paying gold to use the forum for its purpose.

I obviously have no idea how fixable the issue is, and of course I'll leave the current posts up until someone has time to look into things, but if it can't be fixed relatively soon, I'd appreciate knowing it-- I'd like to be able to make some quick gold by going through and deleting all my old formatting experiments!

---------- Post added 02-20-2014 at 02:55 PM ----------

I was trying to find a less long-winded way of explaining the issue-- I get wordy. This might be clearer? If you post something in plain text, nothing happens... but if you post the same thing and bold something in the post, you'll lose a tiny bit of gold. Which adds up fast when you're centering, changing colors and fonts, doing quotes and hidetitles, etc. I think it's because the gold system subtracts that stuff before giving you your gold?

Hope that helps explain the problem better!

Wyrm, I want to let you know that we are currently looking into this. :3
So far my findings have not shown much. I've tried simple bbc codes such as lines, lists, and spoilers, with no negative effect to gold count. What I have found is that if you do not override auto-merge there is some gold loss. There's still a lot more to look into. However for now, I would just suggest that you make sure you override the auto-merge and take note if there are any other instances of gold loss.

Alright, thanks! And I'd just like to say also, that I really appreciate how quick the admin on Mene get to work whenever a problem is brought to their attention. You guys are awesome.