Quoting Issue Cured, We Think!

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!

For a moment there, I thought “weird characters” referred to some of the posters hanging around there - that would get rid of about half of us, I think.

I wasn’t eliminated, so I guess I’m not weird!

That will remove a chief source of amusement for some of the less mature characters here. “Ooh, your post is full of question marks!”

I thought it had to do with the way a lot of people talk these days? Like, they end every statement with a question in their voice? Like, so, you know, you won’t think they’re being too assertive? And, so, like, you know, you’ll like them better?