[Carthego delenda est]

You’re nowhere near the first to have commented about it. It does make reading difficult at times.

[jonsie]

I was just wondering that myself, anyone have an answer for these hard to read posts?

[ViLaLuz]

I€ €¤{¤€₩《¿¤ &€《¤

[don-o]

[nuconvert]

People seem to have been noticing it for a week or so

[Gunslingr3]

check this link for an explanation of what you're seeing.

[Robert DeLong]

The explanation for this is not an easy one, however, this person does a good job of explaining what is happening when copying from one site and pasting it on Free Republic website. Actually, it seems that merely copying & pasting does it when a single or double quote is within the text copied.

Note: While he may be explaining it as pasting to word or email, the same applies when the pasting is done to another website.

[Em and Brets Mum]

Not sure, but might it have anything to do with “smart quotes” that are in Microsoft Word? They’re the “curly” quote marks (and also apostrophes and single quote marks), rather than the “straight” quote marks. That might happen when any text with smart quotes is directly copied from another source, without first changing the text to “plain” text.

[usurper]

I am having the same problem some post are impossible to read and I have formatting errors all over the place. Seems to be getting worse by the day.

There have always been some problems and errors but its getting out of control. I think it started we when the security alerts were pinging everyone.

[afraidfortherepublic]

It’s very frustrating. The strange characters also do not show up in the Preview box so you cannot fix them in advance of posting.

[DouglasKC]

yah I’m seeing it too. Same on two different computers and my android phone.

[Guenevere]

Jim and son John know about this...they’re on it.

[M Kehoe]

Aha! So I'm not hallucinating! Whew.

5.56mm

[hondact200]

It is happening because there is a bad case of Smirnoff’s Vodka out there! So the Russkies are really upset and they have infected our computers, and smartphones with the Russian Cyrillic alphabet! Just kidding

[Fantasywriter]

I’m not saying it’s aliens,

but...

[deport]

A few other threads on this topic. May provide some info to you.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3354405/posts

Yes, we know. It’s an old ms word smart character or “curly quotes” problem that’s plagued
us before. Don’t know why it’s popping up again. I’ve tackled this previously myself
on other projects and it’s difficult to solve. Hoping John gets it sorted out soon.

6 posted on Thursday, October 29, 2015 6:14:13 PM by Jim Robinson (Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God!)

********

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3354891/posts

Apparently it’s a copy and paste issue. If you type the charaters in they show up
correctly as opposed to copy and paste which are screwed up.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

It's an issue with the database used on FR, most likely.

Those that work on such things are working on it. Something to do with a specific bit of code calling an incorrect character set. Finding it can be a royal pain.

[Protect the Bill of Rights]

Me too.

[SkyDancer]

Glad someone brought that up, same with me. Thought it was my computer doing that.

[NYAmerican]

Not sure if this applies here, but in order to avoid that problem in other apps, I often Paste my text into Notepad (a pure Text editor) first, then copy from Notepad and paste again into my Target app, it seems to be fairly efficient in getting rid of weird control characters.