phpBB broken ?

canonian · Post by **canonian** » Mon Oct 20, 2014 10:12 am

phpBB seems to make it impossible to use the mu (Alt-0181) symbol in the message body since a couple of days..??
Except when cutting & pasting the μ symbol from other sources e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_%28letter%29 ; or using & # 9 5 6 ; (without spaces) in the text.
As soon as you place an Alt-0181 in the message body the preview gets emptied.

canonian · Post by **canonian** » Mon Oct 20, 2014 10:28 am

μ still broken, a fresh post doesn't seem to affect it.

TheLostVertex · Post by **TheLostVertex** » Mon Oct 20, 2014 11:29 am

Maybe it is an encoding issue between what the character is typed as and what the forum software accepts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encoding Since 956 and 181 is the code for the forum, I assume it uses unicode character set.

So on the positive side, you should be able to just look up the unicode character value and do "& # UNICODENUMBER ;" no quotes or spaces.

TheLostVertex · Post by **TheLostVertex** » Mon Oct 20, 2014 11:43 am

A quick test confirms my guess, switching the character encoding in safari from the default western encoding to unicode allows me to use opt+m to type Âµ(on mac). With western encoding typing a Âµ results in the message being cleared by the forum.

The textfields should be able to specify the encoding they accept. So it is a forum software issue that it is not specifying this.

ChrisR · Post by **ChrisR** » Mon Oct 20, 2014 1:38 pm

I'm having no trouble posting µ or μ . but Chris S. is, both unicodes. We've been communicating over it and finding that he CAN put them in private messages.
Weird!

TheLostVertex · Post by **TheLostVertex** » Mon Oct 20, 2014 1:56 pm

ChrisR wrote:I'm having no trouble posting µ or μ . but Chris S. is, both unicodes. We've been communicating over it and finding that he CAN put them in private messages.
Weird!

What browser are you using, and do you know if it is the same as Chris S.'s browser? Browsers have a default encoding they use, and some will let you change it. Further still you can force most browsers to use a certain character set when submitting a form.

ChrisR · Post by **ChrisR** » Mon Oct 20, 2014 2:01 pm

I'm using Firefox 32.0.3 (not quite the latest

). Chris S has tried a variety.

canonian · Post by **canonian** » Mon Oct 20, 2014 2:25 pm

I'm μsing Firefox 33 but I don't think it's a browser thing.
Ctrl-Alt-M and Alt-230 gives the same result: a blank preview.

Chris S. · Post by **Chris S.** » Mon Oct 20, 2014 3:12 pm

I mostly use Maxthon Browser v3.4.5.2000, but am having the same problem with Firefox 33. Ditto with Firefox 33 on an entirely different computer.

As ChrisR said, I was easily and repeatedly able to type the mu symbol into a pm, but not into BRTech's thread (where the contents of my input box disappear). In the thread you are reading now, I've had two different behaviors when previewing a post. At first, if I typed a mu symbol and hit preview, the mu symbol previewed properly, while the symbol in the input box automatically changed into "(ampersand)#956;" (but with the ampersand character "&" in place of the word "ampersand"). After a few tries, this stopped happening, and the disappearing contents started recurring.

I've used the mu sign many times in the past, without either of the above behaviors. I haven't consciously changed anything on either computer that I've experienced this behavior on, although both receive regular automatic Windows 7 updates.

--Chris

abpho · Post by **abpho** » Mon Oct 20, 2014 3:29 pm

On the iMac I just hit ALT (option) m = µ. Works every time.

I think you guys are having problems with windows. In the past when I was using Windows and I copied and pasted a specialty character it never pasted properly.

TheLostVertex · Post by **TheLostVertex** » Mon Oct 20, 2014 3:54 pm

abpho wrote:On the iMac I just hit ALT (option) m = Âµ. Works every time.

I think you guys are having problems with windows. In the past when I was using Windows and I copied and pasted a specialty character it never pasted properly.

Windows is not the problem. This problem is reproducible on OSX(I have already reproduced it on my iMac). The problem is the page is defaulting to ISO-8859 character encoding, and the forum software or database(I do not know much about the structure of phpbb) wants Unicode.

I have just got done testing in windows with Firefox and chrome. With western encoding the Mu symbol will not work when submitting a post. When the encoding is set to UTF-8, it submits fine in chrome, and almost fine in Firefox(Firefox's fault).

This problem should be easy to fix. I assume somebody changed a forum setting for encoding, or the database encoding.

Chris S., if you can try in Maxthon to set the encoding when you are posting to UTF-8 from Menu > Tools > Encoding that should fix the issue. This is only a temporary fix of course.

Chris S. · Post by **Chris S.** » Mon Oct 20, 2014 4:17 pm

TheLostVertex wrote:Chris S., if you can try in Maxthon to set the encoding when you are posting to UTF-8 from Menu > Tools > Encoding that should fix the issue. This is only a temporary fix of course.

Thanks for trying, Steven, but this didn't work for me.

If anyone else uses Maxthon and wants to try this, in my version it's Menu>Options>Advanced to get to where you set the encoding.

Cheers,

--Chris

ChrisR · Post by **ChrisR** » Mon Oct 20, 2014 4:28 pm

My Firefox is set to Western encoding, not Unicode.
Chris S's experience makes it sound like inconsistent phpBB behaviour?

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Mon Oct 20, 2014 5:12 pm

I have no solid idea yet what the problem is. But I have another website at the same hosting service that developed some very different problems at the same time, in a completely different chunk of php code (phpBB versus dokuwiki). Neither site had any configuration or software changes at my level, so I'm thinking there was an update to the php engine that has had some interesting side effects. That's just speculation at this point, however.

--Rik

canonian · Post by **canonian** » Tue Oct 21, 2014 3:46 am

..Just a bold idea: could the underlaying DB be the cause of this?
Could MySQL (or whatever DB Engine is running PM.Net) be the cμlprit?