Special Characters in posts???

Is it possible that someone is screwing around with the forum setup today, specifically in regard to fonts, characters, and such?

I encountered difficulties when trying to edit the index to the Casino Chip of the Day thread. The first symptom was that long strings of strange special characters appeared in the post where they had not appeared previously and where I had not done anything to edit the post. It took quite a while for me to clean all of that up.

The next symptom was that in a small number of places were special characters really are supposed to be -- and where they have appeared just fine in the past -- they were replaced by spurious characters. I have tried to correct those, but I cannot get them to appear correctly. Here are some examples:

#1. In this post by Konbu, you can see that the name of the casino has an accent mark in it. It should be "Casino Atlantico" with an acute accent mark over the lower case "a" in Atlantico. Now I can create that special character by pressing a couple of extra keys on my keyboard, and when I do that the accented letter appears right here in this paragraph. However, when I preview this post, the accented "a" is changed, and the word becomes Atlántico. What the heck is going on there? This used to work just fine.

#2. In this post by AcesAndEights, you can see that the name of the casino has two accent marks -- in Kartac, the final "a" has an acute accent and the "c" has an inverted caret. Now, while I know how to add a caret over a letter, I have not figured out how to add an inverted caret, so I have copied the entire casino name from AcesAndEights's post. However, while the name appears just fine when I paste it here, it becomes Kartá� when I preview it. The word continues to look fine in AcesAndEights's post, but it is screwed up when I copy/paste it into mine. Does that make any sense?

I used to have both of those casino names appearing just fine in the index to the thread, but I cannot make them work properly today. As I asked, is someone screwing around with the forum today?

I don't know how the forum tools worked before, but you can insert the diacritical marks needed to render Kartáč using the UTF-8 diacritical mark codes found here: UTF-8 Diacritical Marks

Once the codes have been rendered in a post you can no longer edit them. Don't use preview, it will mess things up.

Also, the diacritical mark codes will have to be re-entered for any quotes or edits, a real pain in the ass. I think "not working as intended" applies.

Δ

Quote: RS

�

That last post was me hitting "quote," "preview" and then "post."
This one is me hitting "preview" a bunch of times (without typing anything in the quote block):

Quote: RS

����¯�¿�½���¯���¿���½������¯������¿������½����¯�¿�½������¯����¯�¿�½������¿����¯�¿�½������½����¯�¿�½���¯���¿���½����¯�¿�½������¯����¯�¿�½���¯���¿���½����¯�¿�½������¿����¯�¿�½���¯���¿���½����¯�¿�½������½

Yeah, something's a bit off...

Quote: RS

Δ

Can you try it now?

Copy-paste for Kartáč now works, including a preview.

Quote: miroslavlav

Can you try it now?

OK, I will.


Atlántico. (Typed using the keyboard.)
Karta�c�. (Copied and pasted.)

Note: Those two lines looked just fine until I went back to edit the post and add a comment. Then they were screwed up again. So something still isn't correct. Just to verify this I will retype those lines below and not edit the post after this.

Atlántico. (Typed using the keyboard.)
Kartáč. (Copied and pasted.)

Much improvement, but something still seems amiss.

Looks as if something is still not working quite right. Here is a brand new post with no preview, editing, whatever, just a straight post.

Atlántico.

Kartáč.

Just typed/pasted those and will leave them alone after I hit "post."

Yep, looks like the problem comes up when I try to edit a post made previously. Since I have to edit very old posts (the index to the Casino Chip of the Day thread) every time someone posts a new casino's chip, I have been editing frequently for years without a problem and seem to have a new one now.

What's up? What was the change to the forum that started this?

Yes Doc, you're right. Now edit is also fine :)

Let's see...

Atlántico

Kartáč



Yep. Entered, previewed, posted, edited, and still looks fine. Thanks for the help!

(Still curious as to what started the problem.)

Reviving this thread for another post --

Out of boredom, perhaps, I started looking at some very old threads and posts I had made in this forum. I came across this post that I made way back in March 2010. I noticed immediately that every place I had used quotation marks, they had been replaced by the symbol: � (a white question mark inside a black diamond.)

Now, that post has not been previewed, edited, or perhaps even read since back in 2010. I have no idea when the transformation from " to � occurred, but I immediately thought about the recent issues with spurious/modified characters, as discussed in this thread. I have also noticed this same � character appearing in several members' sig lines where it did not appear in the past.

Is this all the same problem showing up different places? What really did start this phenomenon, and is there any way to get back to the way the forum posts used to work? Is there a way to fix all the damage caused to old posts?

That symbol is the "illegal utf8 character" marker.

It looks to me like the bytes for the old posts are stored in a different format, most likely UTF-16, but upon display they are attempting to be displayed as if they were stored in UTF-8 bytes.

A similar thing, with incompatible encodings being used, is most likely also what was going on with the edit old posts function.

Thanks for the info, Dalex64.

I know almost nothing about web site design, associated character sets, and storage formats. It sounds to me a bit as if the forum tried to take a step backwards and stumbled. I asked a few times what started this, and even the admin who has resolved many of the issues has chosen not to answer. Just seems there might be a bit more damage to be repaired from a (failed?) attempt.

Hi all,

Doc, sorry for the late reply. Actually issue was because host updated php version (without announcement) and that caused those issues

First I made corrections to comply with that version, because I thought that only issues were first ones you mentioned, but now I just restored it to previous version of php, until I see where else issues can come from

Anyway, now all should be fine, as it was before

Thanks for your feed back :)

miroslavlav, thank you very much for both the reply and at least a temporary fix. I did not mean to be unduly critical (or grumpy) in my comments and questions. It's just a bit disconcerting to a long-time member to start seeing posts that have been just fine in the past now begin to crumble. Here's my very sincere wish that you are able to find a permanent fix and that the forum's host doesn't continue to trip up your efforts.

As I said before, I know almost nothing about web site design, and even the term "php version" means nothing to me. I'm just glad that there are folks around who do understand such things and can deal with them.

On a very slightly related note, a couple of my posts above (from about 67 hours ago and about 30 hours ago) now have footnotes added that look a bit like this:
Last edited by: unnamed administrator on Nov 14, 2016

That kind of footnote typically means that someone posted something that was offensive or otherwise forbidden, and it got removed. I hope I didn't do such a thing, and I certainly don't remember what it could have been.

Hi Doc,

no problem, your post was edited by me, because I was testing with your text, so don't worry about it :)