Bug reports & suggestions

[Gilbert]

Lucky no one sees our secret plans!

[Snarky]

I can't see my Sent Messages (PMs). Trying to load the page fails.

To be more specific, the page I'm talking about is Messages | Sent Items, with URL https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?action=pm;f=sent

However, I just tried with an alternate test account, so maybe there's something particularly broken for me? Too many PMs sent?

[morganw]

Is it possible to enable the display of a post's date/time on the WAP view?

[Khris]

Probably a bit annoying at this point, but...

Just a friendly reminder that this still isn't fixed

Looks like the forum just lost the default setting of  ags for   [code]  tags.

[AGA]

Probably a bit annoying at this point, but...

Yes.  I'm trying to look into it, but it's far more complicated than it should be.  If you're good enough at PHP by all means chip in though.

[Snarky]

It seems like more or less every extended character (typographic, foreign letters, etc.) in every old post has been mangled. Is it not possible to fix this?

If you can give me examples of the mangled characters, and what they should be (i.e. "%$£ should be â,¬"), I can probably fix each instance.  Otherwise, I'm afraid not.

Check out the reference guide here:

https://www.i18nqa.com/debug/utf8-debug.html
(See also this old thread.)

And roughly in suggested order of priority:

Error	Correct
…	…
â€"	â€"
â€"	â€"
’	’
‘	‘
„	„
•	•
»	»
«	«
¿	¿
¢	¢
£	£
â,¬	â,¬
â,,¢	â,,¢
©	©
®	®
Ç	Ç
ç	ç
Ã'	Ã'
ñ	ñ
Ö	Ö
ö	ö
Ã,,	Ã,,
ä	ä
Æ	Æ
æ	æ
Ø	Ø
ø	ø
Å	Å
å	å
Ü	Ü
ü	ü
É	É
é	é

(Ideally all changes should be done in a single operation, to reduce the risk of certain sequences being garbled.)

[AGA]

Great!  I chained all 34 into one monster query, and it seems to have worked.  I passed it on topic and PM titles and bodies, so only particularly obscure characters should remain garbled now!

[Snarky]

Cool! Let's hope I didn't make any mistakes in that table. 

Although, this post appears to be… differently garbled than it was before.

Edit: And uh-oh. The entry that shows up as "Å " was supposed to be "Å ".

[AGA]

I ran the full 123 character list, since we missed a few with the first pass.  Should be fine now.

However, it seems various characters have become "�", but it isn't possible to do a find and replace since the affected characters are all different...

[Snarky]

That's bizarre and a little worrying, but it only appears to affect 22 posts, so as long as that's the only garbled string it's not too bad.

I'm more concerned that my Ã... has turned into Å  again.

[AGA]

That's bizarre and a little worrying, but it only appears to affect 22 posts, so as long as that's the only garbled string it's not too bad.

We've changed charsets a few times over the years in a bid to fix these types of issues.  I'm guessing at some point those 84 posts (including bodies and topics) have been affected.  The last one was in 2013 though, so doesn't seem to be ongoing.

I'm more concerned that my Ã... has turned into Å  again.

This is because the table has Ã... listed as a misencoded version of Å .  So switching it back unfortunately also affected the genuine Ã...s.  Luckily there are only a few single character misencodings (Ã -> Á, Ã -> Í, Ã -> Ï, Ã -> Ð, Ã -> Ý, Ã -> à, Ã... -> Å ) so false positives should be rare.  It's unfortunately going to have affected mostly Scandinavians...  Sorry!

[Snarky]

All right, can't be helped! From the hex code column it appears that the garbled character strings for all of these in fact contain an invisible character (which varies in all the à cases), which is what we should probably have used to do the search-replace. Well, live and learn, and â€" as you say â€" both Ã... and particularly à are probably quite rarely used on the AGS forums.

Thanks!

[AGA]

If you notice any words where it definitely should have been one of the other characters, I'll edit it back.  Unfortunately I can't find a way of searching for "Å " in MySQL, as it's always interpreted as "S" and returns a billion results.

[Cassiebsg]

Does this mean I can't type "NÃO" on the foum?

EDIT: Looks okay, on my end.
EDIT2: Oh, you probably meant on old threads... think we'll survive. 

[AGA]

EDIT2: Oh, you probably meant on old threads... think we'll survive. 

Yeah, all characters should be fine going forward, this was just a (slightly failed) exercise to try to fix the old wonky characters.

[blur]

The two buttons "select all" and "mark selected read" are missing from the Show unread topics since last visit. page.

[Snarky]

Looks like members' display names are also affected by the character corruption.

[Snarky]

Suggestion to update some of the sub-forum descriptions:

Completed Game Announcements
For posting your finished AGS games.

General Discussion
For off-topic conversations and discussions.

The Rumpus Room
For tomfoolery and timewasting, memes and meandering threads.

Edit: Thanks!

[Sinitrena]

Not sure what's going on, but the last few times I tried to log in, I got this message:

Session verification failed. Please try logging out and back in then try again.

And I wasn't logged in; so no need to log out before trying to log in again as the message suggests. Trying to log in immediately afterwards works fine though. No problems at all. Basically, I have to log in twice.

[AGA]

I've seen that message before, it never seems to stick around for long!  Just doing a hard refresh (CTRL+R) then going back to the login page usually works for me.