Buffy Sainte-Marie Happy Birthday!

Subject: RE: Buffy Sainte-Marie Happy Birthday!
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 23 Feb 22 - 03:15 AM

Sorry to carry on but Lin, I think the simplest answer to you question is that it happens because something is not quite right here.

The same has happened to me and others here. I had one the other day when I tried to post a Wordle share. Everything looked fine on preview but the characters for the coloured bars turned into question marks when I posted. My previous post attempted to come up with a possible reason why this might be:

A preview displays the message as it is interpreted from the message submitted in the input form. When you make a post, this is added to a database and is retrieved from there to, eg. display a thread. If there is a discrepancy between the character encoding used by the database and the one for the input, we could wind up with characters getting lost or distorted.

Anyway, I think further debate would need to go to a tech thread.

Subject: RE: Buffy Sainte -Marie Happy Birthday!
From: GUEST,Lin
Date: 22 Feb 22 - 04:35 PM

To Jon Freeman,
I'm not really much of a tech person but this only happens on mudcat. I have posted messages on other sites but never have seen all these question marks appear at the end, even if I have clicked on an icon like a smiley face or birthday cake.
Not sure why it only happens here.

---

Hi, Lin - that's the deal here. Mudcat displays only text, not emoticons. Our software is from 1996, before emoticons were invented. Such is life. You can do emoticons, but ya gotta know the code.
Still and all, I wish Buffy a happy birthday.

😁


-Joe-

Subject: RE: Buffy Sainte -Marie Happy Birthday!
From: Mrrzy
Date: 22 Feb 22 - 02:14 PM

Yay, bday Buffy!

Subject: RE: Buffy Sainte -Marie Happy Birthday!
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 21 Feb 22 - 03:26 AM

Guessing here... Both preview and the thread page are set to utf-8 so I think ought to display the same. Possibly the special characters are getting "mangled" by the database.

Subject: RE: Buffy Sainte -Marie Happy Birthday!
From: GUEST,Lin
Date: 20 Feb 22 - 09:44 PM

Felipa,
Yes, actually I did. At the end of my message, I clicked on the birthday cake and icecream icons. Those never appeared on my post, just a lot of question marks.
Is there a reason (tech wise) why that happens?

Subject: RE: Buffy Sainte -Marie Happy Birthday!
From: Felipa
Date: 20 Feb 22 - 08:21 PM

Lin, Did you have an unusual characters in the original. For instance, if I try posting something with Hebrew or Arabic letters, they would look okay in the preview but show up as question marks in the final post.

Subject: RE: Buffy Sainte -Marie Happy Birthday!
From: Thomas Stern
Date: 20 Feb 22 - 07:36 PM

Happy Birthday!!!
Thomas

Subject: RE: Buffy Sainte -Marie Happy Birthday!
From: GUEST,Lin
Date: 20 Feb 22 - 04:59 PM

Don't know why everytime I post something, all these question marks come up at the end. Did a preview before submitting and didn't see any question marks. I definitely did not hut the question mark on the tablet I use.

Subject: Buffy Sainte -Marie Happy Birthday!
From: GUEST,Lin
Date: 20 Feb 22 - 04:54 PM

Today, February 20, 2022 is Buffy Sainte-Marie's birthday.
81 years old. Hope it is a great celebration.
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