Why is the text in my post corrupted?

[Bill Stearns]

Hi - wondering why, when I enter a "post" some of the words in my text are turning into gobly gook: weird text and symbols. ? not all, but some. Shows up okay, when I'm writing it, happens once I go to post. Weird. BILL

[Marc Jeske]

Go to "Forum Tech Support"..the link below, and a few others on first page. Marc

http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?258182-Computer-putting-weird-characters-in-my-edits

[David Sharp02]

Hi - wondering why, when I enter a "post" some of the words in my text are turning into gobly gook: weird text and symbols. ? not all, but some. Shows up okay, when I'm writing it, happens once I go to post. Weird. BILL

It's most likely a bug in the forum software. Sadly a lot of software written these days don't handle character data properly. See this link: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minimum-every-software-developer-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-unicode-and-character-sets-no-excuses/
(https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minimum-every-software-developer-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-unicode-and-character-sets-no-excuses/)
Alternatively, it could be a bug in your browser, a misconfiguration, or a combination of all of these.

[Keith Outten]

We have thousands of people who are not having this problem which leads me to believe the current issue is not the vBulletin software on our server. Given the fact that vBulletin has said that they will no longer be offering upgrades to version 4 it won't be long before other problems arise that we will not be able to correct.

We have paid for and installed a vBulletin version 5 test bed, the V5 software is full of problems, so much so that we cannot run it on SawMill Creek. We are preparing to convert SawMill Creek to Xenforo software but we don't have a date established yet. Aaron Koehl has corrected all of the issues that the last upgrade to V4 created so we are in pretty good shape for now. The handwriting is on the wall though and we will have to upgrade in time as browsers and other programs are upgraded and vBulletin becomes the weak link that cannot be fixed. Given the scope of the problem and that fact that everyone here will be required to deal with major changes Aaron will probably prefer to wait until the Christmas Holiday season before he makes the conversion.

Our Staff has to prepare for the conversion and be ready for an onslaught of questions and tech support issues that will inevitably come our way in volume. Right now Aaron is programming our advertising menu system for our advertisers and there are a few other features that he has to customize before we convert. We will get this done hopefully at a very slow pace so we don't make any mistakes and end up with an active forum that has major problems that need to be corrected while hundreds of people are online.

[Matt McCoy]

Thanks for doing all of this, Keith. It is appreciated.