Strange characters appearing
 

...and I'm not talking about odd people!

I expect many of you have noticed that weird things like this have appeared in certain posts: ‘€™

I started a thread the same as this a few minutes ago and when I went back to edit it half of my post had disappeared; I had to delete the thread and start again. Obviously something's going on, and I've contacted Alex in case he's not aware of it yet.

I thought it might be something to do with ''Character Set", which only Alex can fix, but I'm not sure if that's the problem or not.

Watch this space...

Jayne

Annie,
Don't panic that your thread has disappeared; I deleted it as I've started this one by way of explanation (well, sort of...)

Jayne

OK. I was only panicking because yours did. Disappear, I mean. I see that this is happening in all forums. Some of the original poems in Met, for instance, have been retrospectively changed - changed utterly, with no terrible beauty to be found in the wreckage.

Any attempt at editing results in the disappearance of what was originally there, as I found with my original thread about all this...

We'll just have to wait and see what Alex says, or is able to do. I'm utterly powerless here. What a bummer.

Jayne

It has happened to me a couple of times in the past 24 hours. I posted to a thread and only the first few sentences appeared. I had to go back and repost.
It seemed to be dependent on some of the formatting I was using. For example, I had bulleted some points and when I posted it it was only partially there (first few sentences. I went back and deleted the bulleted formatting, reposted, and it came through. I've also noticed some strange symbols being substituted for letters in a couple of comments. Strange...

I'm editing now to see if it happens. Be back shortly.... nope, everything fine...

I thought it was only affecting words using apostrophes, but it's not consistently affecting all of the poems with apostrophes in them.

Curiouser and curiouser...

Jayne

Jim's first reply to Allen's Working Title poem is wondrous indeed.

Yet John's, immediately following it (in fact all the succeeding posts) includes both an apostrophe and inverted commas which haven't been interfered with at all.

Jayne

I think it's an attack of winter-breeding grammasites. This phase usually lasts only a few hours. Often they are mistaken for word-termites. Be patient. Spray with intellect. Wait. On the other hand...

It's affecting 'special characters' that have been cut-and-pasted in from elsewhere (a Word document say, or the web), but not things that have been directly typed into the text editor at the Sphere.

For example, it affects open-single-quote and close-single-quote, and curled apostrophes, which are characters you can't type directly into the text editor (here you just get a straight apostrophe/single quote). Presumably the Sphere used to be able to handle converting these special characters, but isn't at the moment for some reason.