Maybe it is just me, but (Vanity)

11/5/2015 | Me

[Michael.SF.]

In the last few weeks I have seen symbols appearing where commas or quotation marks should be. Such as this:

extremists — .... Mark Levin —

I don't know about anyone else, but they kind of bug me. By accident, I found a fix.

[kinsman redeemer]

Oh!
Never mind.
My beeber batteries leaked on the thing-doodle.
Time for a shower.

[Michael.SF.]

I had not seen it posted, but one cannot see everything.

Thanks

[miserare]

Try stuning your beeber, and let the moose have your sister.

[kinsman redeemer]

€€£She¥¥s dead>Jim!

[WayneS]

You’re not.

In fact, no one else can see or read your posts...

[John Valentine]

Doesn’t work for me. These characters appear in my own typing... ooops, see?

[kinsman redeemer]

Thanks! But I stuned it before my thing-doodle went south.

Are there any calls for me €€?

[SpaceBar]

FreeRepublic has a misconfigured webserver. It is serving up ISO-8859-1, but embedding a charset tag that forces your browser to interpret it as UTF-8.

[thackney]

The issue is that when you copy from a web site it is encoded with an “alphabet.” Sometimes that alphabet is not consistent with the FR web page settings.

It is not that. I've experienced it by cutting and pasting text with quotes and apostrophes directly from Free Republic.

Even though they displayed correctly in the original post, such as yours above, they do not display correctly from a direct cut and paste.

It is not an issue of other websites encoding. It is a problem within Free Republic.

[smokingfrog]

click to log in here

[Larry Lucido]

A lot of folks’ mustaches are getting really, really long.

[miserare]

I don’t know, but I saw a black helicopter over your house. ;)

[FourtySeven]

Thank you.

Also, FYI, from what I’ve read the mods are aware of this issue.

[Vermont Lt]

I had not heard that.

This used to happen to me years ago when I would cut and paste from word into my own web site. Converting it to text always worked.

[Windflier]

I had not seen it posted, but one cannot see everything. Thanks

Well, over the last week there have been dozens of vanity posts about the issue. Several a day, in fact. I understand your missing those, if you only get to pop in once in a while.

[Jane Long]

Been doing the same. It is a pain....that’s for sure :(

[thackney]

Here is a simple demostration.

I used the sandbox thread for testing.

First post I typed, no problem.

Second post, I cut and pasted the same text directly from Free Republic and got the messed up characters.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3242857/replies?c=116

[kinsman redeemer]

That’s why I’m saying “shiny side OUT”.

The pilot is a Wookie. We talk to each other on FR.

“The brownies are in the frig.”

Repeat:
“The brownies are in the frig. “

[Michael.SF.]

Understood.

I also reported my post under the "abuse" option, just in case it was overkill. Looks like they felt it was helpful, as it is still up.

Thanks again.

[patriotsoul]

Isn’t it a font issue? Perhaps that certain font is not on FR server, so punctuation marks appear weird.