Forum glitches

[ABoretz]

Hi all.

Some of you may have noticed that the forum has been glitching out a bit lately.  For example, new member Fluke noted, "your forum doesn't appear to allow a pound sterling sign, and cuts off the rest of a message that follows it."  I've also noticed that copy/pasting text from web pages or documents that have embedded (invisible) formatting codes can cause the same effect.

In addition, some of the text that's already been entered on the forum has disappeared (look down the list of topics in "General Chat" and you'll see one that now reads "Floex [Tom" when it used to have his full name in brackets. 

JD knows about this and has someone working on it.  To help in debugging this problem please use this thread to enter any personal error-experiences that you may come up against so the forum programmer can get your direct feedback that way.

Thanks for your patience while this gets sorted out and remember to save often.   
-Alex

[popsUlfr]

Help! My post gets always cut when I try to post or edit! : http://forum.amanita-design.net/index.php?topic=298.0
I wrapped Quote tags around the text and then I tried to replace them with italic tags. It showed all the text but then I was so stupid to edit it again! and now it isn't working anymore

[ABoretz]

Help! My post gets always cut when I try to post or edit!

Thanks for your input popsUlfr!  The same thing happened to mccartercar today. http://forum.amanita-design.net/index.php?topic=280.msg1204#msg1204  And I think this pixelsocks article has given us a major clue about the nature of this bug!

It was the apostrophes that caused the cut-offs.  In your case the text you were trying to copy/paste from the pixelsocks interviews read "Unlike with 3D models we can't..."  and everything following the apostrophe was truncated.  In mccartercar's case it was everything after "We're...".  But there I took the liberty of going in and editing the post and manually retyped the text from the same pixelsocks interview, which is why it's readable now.

We're beginning to suss out patterns in this "dropped text" bug, gang.  Text that uses special formats for punctuation or pound sterling signs are not being recognized by the SMF software.  

Hopefully the fix will come sooner than later.    

[popsUlfr]

I finally posted it, I typed the quote manually and it seems to work. Thanks ABoretz!

[ABoretz]

If you view the source code of the pixelsocks interview you see that apostrophes are coded as "’" and that's what the SMF software is choking on.  (Note: I added underscores ahead of the codes below so that you could see them)

"Unlike with 3D models, we can_’t modify the characters"
"We_’re not quite done with the game yet"

I haven't thoroughly sought out the other special character codes that cause the same text-drop yet but every little bit of light we can shine on this problem might help the forum programmer(s) reach a solution more quickly so keep sharing your discoveries, friends.

In the meantime be aware that just copying text from web sites and pasting it into your forum posts directly will probably result in some of the text being truncated.  Your best solution is to either select the text you want to use from a "View Source" window and then manually removing special characters or just re-typing the text yourself.

-Alex

[ABoretz]

xbhaskarx's post has demonstrated conclusively that special character codes were the culprits in the truncated text glitches we've experienced when copy/pasting text.

View the Gamasutra interview's source code and you find no special characters for apostrophes.  Note, too, that the codes for BOLD used there (<b> </b>) were ignored by the SMF software and xbhaskarx had to use SMF's codes to duplicate how the Q&A was formatted on Gamasutra's page.

[Josey]

i also experienced this posting-cut-off-thing on this forum....but its not that awefull, i mean after u have written what u want u can copy it than post it hit the button modify and paste it than post it again and voila u have made your point

isnt it wonderful   ?

[jd]

it seems those glitches are fixed now thanks to ABoretz

[nicolas]

Gøöd, tè$tîng thât ...
€dÎt: |t wØrk$, thànk$ !