Got a forum related problem I'd like help with

[Dansel]

So, I got a problem with the font used in this forum. Several of the posts here are quite frankly illegible due to ~some issue.

For example this quote is from the Zero Interface thread in the Ranma 1/2 subsection:

ôWeÆre not going to get married, you know!ö the girl Akane Tendo started.

ôYouÆre tellinÆ me?ö he shot back, completely annoyed with her.

ôSo donÆt hang around me in school.ö

ôDonÆt worry! I canÆt stand macho chicks like you!ö he snapped. 

And while I can figure out what it is supposed to say I really can't stand reading an entire story like that.
Any ideas?

 

[NuitTombee]

Those are errors from the data scrape/transfer from old TFF to this one. They're, to my knowledge, limited to posts made before the move. Which was a bit over 3 years ago.

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6677172/1/Zero-Interface

 

[Dansel]

So there is nothing I can do to increase readability on the forum? Just find another source?

 

[NuitTombee]

Other than the author or a mod editting the posts, nothing practical.

 

[ThreadWeaver]

You could copy/paste the segments into an editor and do a find/replace on the characters. Basically, it's punctuation that got hosed. Quotes and apostrophes to be exact.

 

[NuitTombee]

There's always the old forum as well for things pre-2013. http://z14.invisionfree.com/The_Fanfiction_Forum/index.php?

 

[daniel_gudman]

So there is nothing I can do to increase readability on the forum? Just find another source?

Other than the author or a mod editting the posts, nothing practical.

I will say that this is something that we have talked about fixing and is still kinda on the radar, but Wata and Shirotsume haven't yet figured out a way to do it that isn't stupidly labor intensive, like manually running a find/replace on every affected post.

 

[Shirotsume]

You know, have we ever just brought it up to Spork? Double check that there isn't a (relatively) simple thing he can do on his end?

Especially if the problem is that we're running on a version of mySQL that doesn't have full UTF8 or more support- we're going to get nowhere without his help.

EDIT: I should clarify that we shouldn't expect him to fix it for us- he's already busted his ass far more than he should ever need to for us, and I doubt we're light on his server's processing power- but he may at least be able to tell us if we've got possibilities or not.