If I have one wish for this forum, it's that the problems with accents, special characters and smart quotes from cut-and-pasted text be fixed. It detracts from the experience and I know relatively simple to do.

Thanks in anticipation.

Mark, do I assume correctly that this is a request for Chris to implement a technical solution?

Or is it a suggestion for users to exclude such characters from their postings, at least until a technical solution is implemented?

Both sound reasonable (though I am always rather fearful of changes in the infrastructure of a Content Management System). However, in the latter case I am uncertain which characters I should exclude. I seem to remember the issue with "smart quotes" posted from Word; should I assume that anything outside of ANSI is a potential cause for trouble?

How trivial and ungrateful !

The individual who set up this forum, who maintains it and who probably pays for its continued existence on the Net deserves our gratitude, rather than an entirely inappropriate pickiness. The purpose of this forum is to share knowledge and experience, NOT to read each posting letter-by-letter.

It is a request for Chris to fix it. It is ungrateful.

And perhaps I should have done it privately (too late now. I did it impulsively, and I can't delete the post). But when you have a site (sporting ads, however unprofitable they may be) that relies on user-contributed content, to have those same users look silly because they did the innocent thing and pasted text in the box, expecting it to look normal once submitted, only for their postings to be filled with question marks, that seems to lack gratitude as well.

Having done some web programming myself, I know the solution isn't hard. And if he'd grant me access to the code, I'd fix it myself.

Apologies to those offended.

And obviously I don't think it's trivial. That's an odd thing to say for people so devoted to the written word. Or perhaps you don't have accents in your name, in your native language or use Word.

This site has ads? News to me. I guess the ad blocker I installed to make the "Washington Post" readable works better than I could have expected!

Also, I can't recall seeing any postings that had more than a couple of small glitches. I know that of those with glitcehs, some are mine.

If it's not too difficult to implement and Chris has got the time, I'd support the request to enable accented characters, so people's names such as N?stor S?nchez can be correctly displayed. Thanks.

Using special characters will work now for user display names (not your login username, for which you should avoid special characters), topic titles, and posts. Unfortunately, it is not retroactive, so older posts won't suddenly display correctly, but new posts should work fine now. Let me know if there are still any issues.

I don't take offense when suggestions for improvements to how the forum works are made. In fact, I have a decent-sized list of things I'd like to do but just haven't gotten around to yet.

Chris

Chris Murtland wrote:

Using special characters will work now for user display names (not your login
username, for which you should avoid special characters), topic titles, and posts.
Unfortunately, it is not retroactive, so older posts won't suddenly display
correctly, but new posts should work fine now. Let me know if there are still any
issues.

Chris, many thanks for fixing this.

Many thanks Chris!