Quotation Mark Corruption in Posts?

[Baron]

Hi!  Strange issue with this post in the Fortnightly Writing Competition Thread.

All the quotation marks have been changed to “ or some iteration thereof.  I didn't think anything of it when it was first reported, thinking it must have happened when I copied and pasted the story over from my word processor.  I was pretty sure I had proofread in the forums, but maybe I was tired and didn't follow my regular habit.  But then another competitor posted that the story was fine when it was first posted and then got corrupted later.  This reminds me that I have in fact noticed similar corruptions of some of Sinitrena's writing competition submissions (but I can't remember how far back in the past that was).  I am therefore pretty sure this is a glitch in the forums, albeit a rare one.

Honestly, I'm not sure this is important enough to pursue, but I'm reporting it in case it's related to broader issues.   

[fernewelten]

I noticed myself some time ago that the system will corrupt all the typographic quote marks “…” if I reopen an old post for modification through the small "Modify post" button at the end of a post. But if I reopen the same post with the big “Modify” button at the start of my post, it does not.

The quote marks are still fine when in the editing window, but when the window is saved, then the quote marks are corrupted. All the quote marks are corrupted no matter whether I touched them.

There's probably some rogue code at work that can't handle UTF8 unicode and that is called the one way but not the other.

[Cassiebsg]

Here's AGA's answer: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=47530.msg636615547#msg636615547

I made a change to hopefully support a wider range of 'foreign' characters.  But unfortunately it seems to have mangled some of the existing ones...  You can edit the post to readd whatever characters went wrong, and they should prevail then.

[AGA]

I'm guessing it's “Word style” quotation marks specifically that were affected in this case?  Rather than plain text "s?  I've edited that one post at least to fix the quotes.  Going forward all new instances of those characters should be fine, it's just the existing ones that have been mangled.

[Baron]

I'm guessing it's “Word style” quotation marks specifically that were affected in this case?  Rather than plain text "s?

I cut & paste from Open Office.  The funny thing is I always use the same word processor to write and always cut & paste into the forums and do a bit of proofreading & editing there.  So I'm not sure why it got corrupted this time but not at any point in the last eight years that I've been writing for the FWC.  Anyway, thanks for looking into it!

[AGA]

It's got nothing to do with anything you did, it's to do with a change in the forums database.  It'll work going forward, it's just older posts with any non standard characters will be affected.

[Baron]

OK.   

...but I just noticed the title of the MAGS December competition thread is "Create Your Own Christmas", only the quote marks are the same weird character codes that were in my story.  Surely the author typed the thread title directly into the forums instead of cut and pasting from another source?

[eri0o]

MacOS naturally uses the "word style" quote marks I think.

[AGA]

Thanks for the pointer though, I've fixed the weird quotes in post titles and bodies now.

[AGA]

I noticed myself some time ago that the system will corrupt all the typographic quote marks “…” if I reopen an old post for modification through the small "Modify post" button at the end of a post. But if I reopen the same post with the big “Modify” button at the start of my post, it does not.

This was an unrelated issue, but should now be fixed:

[testing]
“…”
[/testing]