To Our Writers

[Bob Schroeck]

(Technically this belongs in the "Forums" forum, but I'm betting more of you will see it here.)

If you've ever posted a story (or anything else of reasonable size) to the forums while they were still on ezBoard/Yuku, you may want to find your post(s) and replace them with a clean archive copy of the work.  One of the most annoying things that Crapatalk did when it converted the boards to its own system was it mangled big stories.  And not consistently, either -- as I think I've mentioned before, it seemed to have about four or five different mangle modes.  For instance -- Rev Dark?  All the Thibor  stuff I've come across in the last week or so has had all its quote marks removed.  Why?  Who knows?  Maybe they were bad for Crapatalk's business model.

Line wrap issues seem to be the most common symptom of Crapatalk conversion, but lots of other things can and have happened to big posts.  I've been cleaning things up as much as I can through SQL, but at some point I have to throw my hands up and turn the problem back over to you guys.  This is that point.

Sorry to foist this on you.

[robkelk]

It looks like they stripped out accented characters, too.

Not everybody writes in English, y'know...

[DHBirr]

It looks like they stripped out accented characters, too.

Not everybody writes in English, y'know...

For what it's worth, they didn't strip all accented characters ... or maybe they were stripping in some insane random way — which sounds about par for their course, come to think of it.  But I was checking one of my posts, and although the paragraph breaks have been messed up a bit, there were several points where I used "é" — and it's still there.

-----
“We’ve had our differences, but he’s seen the light … and I made sure he moved toward it, instead of coming back.”

[robkelk]

"é" is the character that I noticed was missing...

As for the quote marks, so far all of mine have been present. Could the missing ones have been Microsoft "smart quotes"?

[LynnInDenver]

Thanks for pointing it out, Bob. I had to "rescue" Geo's speech from where the marker for him not speaking English basically rendered him mute. I also did some other cleanup as I could.

[Black Aeronaut]

I looked back through crapatalk and found that some of my stuff got chopped. Literally. Like as if the post hit some kind of character limit. And I'm having a helluva time finding it in the way back machine. ;_;

[Matrix Dragon]

Some was mangled, some wasn't.

*Sighs, flips off Tapatalk, starts working out where to make repairs.*

[Inquisitive Raven]

But I was checking one of my posts, and although the paragraph breaks have been messed up a bit, there were several points where I used "é" — and it's still there.

BTW, that "é" apparently had its color set to black, which doesn't exactly show up well in San Felix (dark background theme).

[Bob Schroeck]

Sticky-ing this thread as a general message until we're sure everyone's stuff is fixed to their liking.

[Bob Schroeck]

Okay, it's coming up on two months since I first wrote this... has everyone found and fixed their stuff yet?

[robkelk]

Found, yes. Fixed, not yet - I still have some Japanese characters to recover

[Bob Schroeck]

No rush, just wondering. And I'm sure there are people who haven't yet made their way here who have stuff to fix.