All posters have to do is delete and retype them in the 'preview'. Problem solved.
This wasn't a problem in the past. Why won't the software accept alternate forms of punctuation marks now?
For whatever reason, FR is “broken” when it comes to copying and pasting text (from articles, even other posts) into the posting form. Punctuation becomes something else & makes reading very difficult. Manually retyping into FR & replacing all quotes, apostrophes, dashes, etc. is time consuming and quite tedious.
A FReeper (I wish I had kept the reference) gave this link as a temporary solution until John/Jim can get the FR problem figured out. It’s a much quicker alternative than manually trying to fix/retype what you are wanting to post. With this website, you copy the text you want to post & paste it into the top box shown on the website & then hit “convert”. The text will show up in the box below, already highlighted for you to copy it. Copy & paste the converted text into the FR posting screen. PREVIEW and make sure that the text is clean - just a note, every time I have used this link & followed the steps above, the text has been ‘perfect’ and legible when previewing & then when actually posted. I have put this link on my toolbar so when I am posting it is right there for me to access. Hopefully, this will work for you as well as it has been working for me .... and pass it along to others.
http://dan.hersam.com/tools/smart-quotes.html
That gets pretty obnoxious on mobile devices.
It’s a problem which didn’t exist for most of FR’s existence, and should be quite fixable by IT. Orders of magnitude more effort is going into users working around it than it would take to fix on the server.
Didn’t used to be that way...it is a waste of our time to do tbis, and is probably just a software issue.
But posters are not doing that and it’s becoming very hard to read a lot of the material being posted. Annoying.