[Matt Q]

I'm seeing quite a lot strange text characters as of the last day or so. Mark's latest poem, for example, has so many it's close to unreadable in places. Glenn's poem has quite a few, too.

Sometimes strange characters appear because people cut-and-paste non-ascii characters in from Word, and maybe that's all that's happened this time, but I'm also seeing odd characters elsewhere on the boards, too, in places that aren't in people's posts (a capital A with a circumflex to the right of my name at the top of this post, and more on the top right, for example). I've tried several different browsers and it's the same on all of them. Maybe those circumflexed A's have always been there and I've just never noticed before.

Is anyone else seeing this?

[Joe Crocker]

All looks fine to me. Strange.

[Matt Q]

Thanks, Joe. Strange, indeed.

This is what I'm seeing:



The places where it happens suggest there might be some non-ascii characters cut-and-paste from a Word document: a curly apostrophe rather than a straight one, for example. But you can also see various circumflexed A's before Mark's text begins. But odd if you're not seeing any of this.

So, maybe it's something my end. God knows what though. I haven't installed anything new or fiddled with any system settings. Time to get a-googling, I guess.

[Roger Slater]

Does this happen when you use a different browser?

If it looks okay on another browser, try emptying the cache and cookies. You should be able to do that from your browser settings. Then restart the browser and that will probably fix the problem.

[Matt Q]

Thank Roger, I guess you're not seeing this either.

Yes, I've tried various browsers. So far I've tried Chrome, Brave, Edge and Firefox. I see the same on all of them, which is what makes this rather weird.

I've just tried PFFA, another site running an older version of vBulletin, and see the same circumflexed A's, and on a couple of other forum sites too. But I'm not having any problems on any other websites.

Haven't found any solutions yet, hard to know exactly what to search for.

[Matt Q]

So, I went for the solution I should have thought of sooner.

Restarted my computer and everything's back to normal now.

[Brian Allgar]

Yes, that's often the solution if your computer is being stroppy - put the boot in.

[Joe Crocker]

Aah, The IT Crowd

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn2FB1P_Mn8

[Jayne Osborn]

Strange characters hanging around the Sphere

Hi Matt,
When I first saw this thread title, I thought it was going to be about strange people hanging around the Sphere. (Although I daresay there are a few of those too. )

Jayne

[Matt Q]

Actually, turning it off and on again only fixed it temporarily and it came back.

It seems like the issue is something to do with some of the web security features on my VPN (NordVPN) and switching some of these off has fixed this. Just thought that I'd mention that in the unlikely event that anyone else has this issue!