Copying rather than typing

Most identifiers people handle have slack in them, and nexus market links have none at all. Postcodes have a structure, card numbers carry a check digit, ordinary words can be misspelled and still understood. A string of this kind has none of that available to a person. Every one of the 56 positions has to be right.

The format does contain error detection, but it is not something you can apply by looking, and it is not what saves you from a typo. What happens in practice is that a mistyped address either fails to resolve, with no explanation of why, or resolves to something that is not what you wanted. Neither outcome tells you which character you got wrong.

A string that is one character wrong is not a nearly correct address. It is a different address, in exactly the same way that a different phone number is not a nearly correct phone number. There is no closeness, no correction, no suggestion, and no did you mean.

This is the single most important thing to internalise about handling nexus market links, and it is why every page on this board carries a copy button next to each address rather than trusting anybody to read them.

• Traded symbols. A meaningful share of the set is made of symbols the eye swaps, and the bars and gauge above put a number on it.
• Doubled symbols. Where a symbol repeats immediately, transcription drops one or adds one more often than anywhere else.
• Line wraps. A string that wraps across two lines loses characters at the break more often than in the middle of a line.
• Restarts. Losing your place and starting a block again is where duplication and omission both come from.

It moves the problem rather than removing it. A copied address is exactly as correct as the place you copied it from, so the whole question becomes where the address came from rather than whether you transcribed it correctly.

That is a much better question to have. Sources can be thought about, compared and kept. Transcription accuracy cannot be improved by thinking about it.

It also means the copy button on this page is not a guarantee of anything. It copies what this site was given. If what this site was given were wrong, the button would faithfully copy the wrong thing, which is why the board says on the addresses page that copying is the only thing it did.

Sometimes there is nothing to copy from. An address on paper, in a photograph, or on a screen you cannot select from has to be transcribed, and no amount of preferring copying will change that.

In that case use the block method from the chunking panel, work in a fixed width font, and check the result once against the source afterwards rather than trusting the first pass. Then, if you can, get a copyable version and replace what you typed. A transcribed address is a temporary thing that should not become the one you keep.

The reason this matters more than ordinary typing accuracy is the absence of feedback. Type a web address wrongly on the ordinary internet and you usually get a page that tells you something is missing, a suggestion, or a search result. None of that exists here.

A mistyped address of this kind simply does not resolve, and the message you get is the same message you would get if the service were unavailable, if your connection were having trouble, or if the address were correct but nothing was listening. One symptom, four causes, no way to tell them apart from the screen.

That is why people spend so long troubleshooting the wrong thing. They assume the destination is down when the actual fault is a character they got wrong twenty seconds earlier, and there is nothing on the screen to point at the difference. The panel on error screens covers this ambiguity in detail.

Does the copy button send anything anywhere?

No. It writes the text to your clipboard in your browser. This site has no server side handling of any kind and makes no external requests.

Is retyping ever safer than pasting?

Not for accuracy. There are situations where you would rather not have something in a clipboard, and that is a different concern with a different answer.