A few years ago we had a server change, and immediately afterward ended up with all the older posts on the forum displaying certain punctuation (for example: quotation marks and apostrophes) as a black diamond with a question mark in the middle.

SubRosa identified it as an encoding error; and told us which encoding to change it to; and Darkness Eternal wrote out a formula for going back into our old posts and reformatting the encoding on them so they displayed correctly.

(something about changing the encoding, copying the page, refreshing something, pasting, and saving.

At that time I went through my entire story in the fiction section and fixed every posted chapter so it displayed correctly; but the other day I noticed that all those black diamonds are back again. Grrrrrrr, I don't know how the encoding could have been broken again! I haven't touched them since they were fixed years ago!

Does anyone remember how/what steps we need to take to fix them, and also know what is the correct encoding we should be setting it to?

(help please?)

I am not sure how to go back and fix posts. But you can go your browser settings and change the Encoding it is viewing in the current window. Sadly you have to do this every time you go to a new page. In Firefox it is View -> Text Encoding -> Western. Western encoding will fix the bad characters.

Thank you so much, SubRosa!!!

Okay, so it is on my own PC that I'm seeing the black diamonds with the question marks? Other people aren't seeing them? That is good to know!

I see them, too. They only way I have fixed my posts is to individually replace the slanty punctuation with the forum's straight marks. Needless to say I have not fixed many of them.

Same here.

No, I see them too. You have to change the encoding to Western every time you view a page to get them to go to normal.

Urgh...I see that being a loooooooooooooooong drawn out process!


(but thanks for telling me a way I can correct it so others don't see that black diamond!)









What I was hoping to find was a way to change them on this site so everyone who looked at it would see the apostrophes instead of that black diamond. Grits said I can manually change each apostrophe; but is there a way to do whole pages at a time? Would the "Find and Replace" function work for that?

Thank you both so much for your help! (and Mirocu = thanks for letting me know it wasn't just me seeing it).

Khajiit noticed it on his own posts when he uses the “Quick Edit” function. Most of the time we just use full edit and those symbols don’t show up in this one’s end.

Khajiiti is right. Just going to Quick Edit on a post with the errors, and then hitting the complete button fixes them. You don't have to actually change anything. Just open the quick edit window and close it again.

Ooh, I'll have to try this! Thank you so much!