We’ve had a persistent issue in which content pasted from an article (e.g., a news story) might contain question marks or the occasional weird character. (I guess “weird characters” are to be expected here, but we don’t like them to show in the middle of a member’s post! ;))
We have done some major rebuilding on our servers, and as far as we can tell it’s cured. Please let us know if you encounter any character substitutions.
All that rebuilding means we have to rebuild our search index. Since we have millions of posts, this will take a few days. We have temporarily turned off search (which also affects “new posts”, “find more posts by”, etc.) - as soon as we have a big enough search database to be useful, we’ll enable all searching. Thanks for your patience!
As a reminder on quotes from news sites and any other copyrighted content - please do NOT paste in entire articles, no matter how interesting they might be. Under fair use guidelines, it’s ok to paste a short excerpt (say, 1 - 4 sentences) - please do that, and provide a link to the source. Thanks!