Weird characters on posts

[Jason]

Some weird characters are showing up in occasional posts. They look like foreign language letters with accents and such. Not sure why it's happening. I may have exported or imported the database incorrectly.

If you notice a post is unreadable as a result, let me know. You can click on 'Report' in the bottom right. You'll find it under the More button.

[Jason]

So apparently, in many places where an apostrophe, double quote, or single quote should appear, we get a bunch of garbage. That makes some topics unreadable like Buster's story, 'The Really Unpleasant Computer Problem'. I have to find an automated way to fix this or a conversion tool. I suspect that the language character set is at fault here.

I felt bad about your story, Buster, so I went through each chapter with find/replace in a text editor and fixed it. I didn't realize at the time it was a dozen posts! At least that's readable.

[Jason]

Looking more closely, it seems like it was Buster's story, the one I just mentioned and possibly the previous 1 or 2, that had the weird characters. I can tell where they appeared or should have appeared if they didn't have the issue since I had to find/replace them. Basically, where an apostrophe or single quote would go, you'd get this instead:

ââ,¬â,,¢

Or:

ââ,¬Ëœ

And for double quotes, it'd be this or another one for which I can't paste the last character here but is otherwise the same (except for the " at the end).

ââ,¬Å"

Buster, did you happen to paste your characters directly from a word processor into a post, with formatting? Because word processors use different characters for opening and closing single and double quotes and apostrophes.

[fox]

One of my recent posts had weird characters too. I fixed it myself.

[buster]

"Buster, did you happen to paste your characters directly from a word processor into a post, with formatting?"

Don't know. But it certainly is possible. Sorry. I do know better, but I was under terrible stress meeting deadlines at the time.  Or something like that.

I'll check the last story, the penguin one.

[buster]

Penguins same problem. It only has about 1500 views, so we can just chuck it if you want. Not many people poking about on the site anyway.

Wouldn't throw out the others. The top four stories have about 30,000 views total and two are the most important in the General Discussion section. They hold positions 1, 2, 4, 6 in the most viewed.

I can do some of the work if you wish, but not until I sigh a bit and complain to the universe.

[Jason]

Penguins same problem. It only has about 1500 views, so we can just chuck it if you want. Not many people poking about on the site anyway.

I'd prefer not to chuck out anything you wrote. You're a good writer and we all appreciate the story regardless of views.

The top four stories have about 30,000 views total and two are the most important in the General Discussion section. They hold positions 1, 2, 4, and 6 in the most viewed.

Could you provide direct links to all the stories? I will probably fix them all by hand but it'll take a bit of time. If you want to take a stab at any, feel free. If you're using Windows, there should be a find/replace on Notepad. Then you just figure out what each gibberish is meant to portray, a quote or apostrophe-related character from what I've seen and then copy and paste it into 'find' and then put the proper character into 'replace'. I don't remember if there is a 'replace all' option in Notepad or if you have to do each one separately, but you don't have so many that the latter is difficult.

When you're working on story posts, shoot me a private message about which story you're working on so we don't end up editing the same post at the same time. Or message me and we'll break up the work by story. No need to do it all at once. Sorry that it happened.

Btw, I think you'll find that the quote feature on the forum now has larger more-readable text.

[Jason]

Buster, you there? I was hoping for a response. Hopefully, this message will pop up in your unread feed.

[buster]

Buster, you there?

Sorry Jason. I've been digging and gardening. Just so you know, earth is about 3 times heavier than it used to be, and time has speeded up so it takes me 3 or 4 days to complete tasks that used to take one morning. It's not just global warming! The cosmos is breaking. You heard it here first.