Update 07/24/2013
A patch was applied to the board that should resolve this issue 99% of the time. If you have an issue, please report it to the forum admin/moderators so we can determine the cause.
As many of you have experienced, there are significant problems submitting certain characters to the forum. In general this should not be an issue as these characters are generally obscure and not readily accessed from the standard character set on the keyboard except by advanced typographical users.
The problem does manifest if Microsoft Word is used to pre-compose a post, and then copy and paste the post into the forum. Microsoft chose to extended the industry standard for the latin-1 alphabet with "smart quotes". You can find more boring details here* (http://www.catskilltech.com/freeSW/SMF/faqs/#smartq).
The summary is this: If you compose your post in Word and then copy/paste here, you are gonna have a bad time.
A better option is to use Notepad or Wordpad. If you want to stick with an office suite, check out Libre Office which is an open source office suite that competes with MS office and is free. You can also turn off "Smart Quotes" in Word, although I will agree the non-Latin-1 compliant quotes look much better in printed text.
I am working on implementing some code that may replace these characters automagically in the forum software, but there are only so many hours in day. It also appears that this will be standard in the next version of the forum software when it is release.
Sorry for any inconvenience to the members.
--Mitch
*Please don't be offended at the prose at this link. I didn't write it and don't share the authors contempt for people who use word how they see fit. In general I avoid microsoft products personally, but understand that many are fond of them.
The small qurik of the forum itself...
Certain fonts make the 'curly' apostrophe as opposed the straight ones as seen on the word curly. ' " " '
Plus there are other character/symbols that will also not work with the cut and pasting if text, therefore things get cutoff.
I Just learn to deal with it! No Problems!
yea, I had a long intresting post going, then it cut off half way. is there a word limit per post?
Not that I have found. It is usually magic quotes if you have them enabled. Most often it bites guys that type up the post in MS Word, then paste it into the forum window. If the quotation marks look different than simple vertical little hash type quotes -"- then they probably won't work. There are in reality a host of UTF-8 type characters that can cause issues, but the quotes, double or single, that get automagically replaced by word processors, are the biggest issue.
I think we all got caught there :o
If I cut my Post from MSWord, I go back and replace ALL the punctuations after I paste it into the Post Box
Just to be safe 8)
Registered & trade mark symbols, Degree symbol and a few others like a long dash " - " will stop a paste in its tracks.
Before I post I make sure I re-copy the the stuff to the clipboard in case I have to make corrections, especially with the pull-downs where many of these characters might be used, that way I don't loose my links for the pictures or the previous corrected stuff. That is why you will see some modified post's if I had stuff cutoff.
I just learn to deal with these things and chalk it up as learning experience! :-[
This problem has been solved, so I'm going to unpin this.