What's the issue boys?
Uh-Oh! Dad's home!Briefly put, the issue is that for quite some time many folks have been having a hard time posting messages to this new SMF Forum system, getting only "database error" messages for their trouble. This is especially true for our British or Australian members or for those who use their familiar word processors to first draft their messages or cut-n-paste info from websites or other online resources (like our man Richard230 in California).
As I have already
posted in the Forum Improvements section and
also here, I surmise that the root cause of these database errors, judging from the HTML source code header of even this very webpage, is that in typographical terms we are quite literally
rocking like it's 1999, using "charset=ISO-8859-1", which is to say, ANSI (Windows-1252), the original Windows character set for the USA, with support for only 256 different character codes--Not quite as "El Primitivo" as the straight ASCII standard, limited as it was to just 128, but like I pointed out on these Forums months ago, still not much more sophisticated than a stick in the dirt...maybe less.
The problem with that limited default character-handling set for our British and Australian cousins is that common symbols on their
British English keyboards, like their curly breed of apostrophes and dashes (and maybe forward slashes, too), are almost guaranteed to give the Forum indigestion, as will pretty common present-day US symbols like degree, cent, fractions or pretty much anything not found printed on the keyboard of that dusty old Compaq 486 up in the attic with the squirrel living in it. Characters and other "invisible" formatting doodads like "carriage returns", margin shifts or tabs from word processors might also give the Forum a case of the "vapors". As for the long length of some messages causing problems, as thought by some, I am not yet convinced that it is so much the length in itself, so much as the increased likelihood of a longer message containing some offending symbol or character that may be the real issue. After all, I was able to massage WildBill's recent 2,200 word opus, as shown earlier in this thread, into digestibility by simply "globally replacing" all his Ozzie punctuation symbols with my homegrown Virginia ones. Then it was just <Post> and no problem.
Previous postings made in the old Forum system with such characters or other proper foreign symbols like accents or umlauts,
like this one, now resemble Romulan street signs.
The first step to recovery is recognizing there's a problem. So, if you could point whomever may be the Main Admin/Installer-in-Chief/Alpha Geek/Code Monkey of this Forum towards this issue, it might make a lot of folks much happier. Using something more current called "Unicode" would handily fix this issue. If they want to solve the problem, they might do well to
start here.
One major source of frustration for many has been the utter lack of feedback to suggestions about this issue or others in that
Forum Improvements section. It makes Forum users feel "edgy" and uncertain--like that silent treatment from one's "significant udder" before you've realized it's February 14th, and you've neither chocolates nor so much as a wilted petunia on hand. It's been hard not to get the distinct impression that
nobody's at the helm or listening.
Is there even an active Admin for this Forum? I can point to no recent evidence to suggest one.
"SSSSSHHHH! You'll wake the Admin!"
Topic: shitty forum (Read 10316 times)