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#256299 01/25/2015 10:45 AM
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I've seen two situations on a UBB.threads web board ( version 7.5.7 ) with posts disappearing.

The first is with existing posts, if they are called up, but not from the first page and in threaded mode. The title, url, etc will be there......all except for the content.

The second is with new posts. If the user copies content from a web site, particularly with apostrophes, quotation marks, single quotes the post will have a blank content area. It isn't just any apostrophe, single quote, or quotation mark though. You can type those by hand in and it will post. It is some special kind of formatting we can NOT see that is doing this. Dropping the text into a text editor like gedit will NOT clean these marks out, neither will dos2unix ( Mint 17 ).

The same kind of of copy-and-pasted content will work fine on UBB.threads 7.5.8. I'm guessing there is a bug. Is there a particular patch or update the admin can install to make the disappearing post problem stop?

Joined: Jul 2006
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Check your Mysql Version and php versions.

See this post
https://www.ubbcentral.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=254141

and check the bugs forum for more info on post issues as i'm sure its to do with the compatibility issues with Mysql & php.


BOOM !! Version v7.6.1.1
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I've narrowed down the problem to characters such as "smart quotes" - the quote marks that are curved toward the quoted text - and smart apostrophes - the ones that slant top-left to bottom-right, plus some others.

Also, when doing a copy / paste from some source such as a Gmail email, there are embedded characters that defy description. These characters (one of them looks like a degree circle that is in line with the surrounding text) are most easily displayed if you highlight / copy some text from a source such as a Gmail email, then paste it in a word processor such as Micros**t Word. Then - in Word - be sure to display all characters (Tools > Options > View - Formatting marks: turn all on) and you can see some hidden characters that create the above-described problem.

Even one of the UBB display characters - the right-pointing double chevron that occupies one character position ( looks like >> but is only one character wide - HTML code 187 ??) - will cause the following problem. And UBB is using that character in some of its display lines.

NOW THE BIGGER PROBLEM is that - even if all of the text carries across to a UBB post and is displayed correctly in the initial posting, when one tries to edit that original / viewable post, the EDIT TEXT box comes up blank.

THIS GETS WORSE because it seems to cause UBB to set a flag somewhere, marking the post as uneditable, even when the post contents are corrected in another media (Ex.: Notepad) and then pasted in the UBB edit panel, and then a later attempt to edit the 'refined' text is attempted.

The only way out of the conundrum is to delete the flagged / uneditable post, then enter an entirely new post which has had all the garbage characters removed elsewhere.

Since I have some admin permissions in our iteration of the UBB product, I can delete one of my uneditable posts at any time, whereas the regular user at our site does not have this capability.

=============

Does a version later than 7.5.7 fix this headache?


RIck- ("Rick" with a dash - the 'other Rick')

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usually this is due to a mismatch of the character set of the database and what ubb is set to.
You probably have ubb set to iso-8859-1 in the generic language file and your database is using utf-8.

This has to do with one char set being saved to a data base using a different char set.
Now trying to salvage a existing post may result in mixed results.

If it was fine before I would suspect that your host upgraded mysql and changed the language to the new default utf-8 in lieu of the Latin one it used to be.

FYI,
This has been discussed many times before.

Last edited by Ruben; 03/03/2016 4:45 PM.

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UBB.threads Developer
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There are a couple of forum posts that talk about copying invalid (non web safe) characters from Word into threads; here the user indicated that the issue doesn't exist in 7.5.9.

I'd also however like to note that it's still recommended to not use word to compile posts, users should use a standard compliant pure text editor, such as notepad, which will not introduce invalid characters.


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Originally Posted by Ruben
You probably have ubb set to iso-8859-1 in the generic language file and your database is using utf-8.


So... What's to be done about this?

If UBB is indeed set to iso-8859-1, has it been saved as iso-8859-1? Or does MySQL force it to utf-8?
Presumably, UBB should be changed? Would that affect existing posts?

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You know I was thinking the same thing too as I was totally re-writing the output section of my template design to work with the "new standard" of the UBB and still have it compatible with everything else in my site that I'm working on.

What a pain in the rear end LOL, but I got it working now.

I'm wondering what other effects this will have with sites that all ready have thousands of threads and post's in them.

P.S. I had it designed to snow on Christmas Day in the site but the snow is STILL broken and I have to totally re=write that entire java function to make it work I guess.



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UBB.threads Developer
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A previous developer started the path to migrating to HTML5 (towards standards compliance) in 7.5.8, we just cleaned it up in 7.5.9 and in the coding for 7.6.0 (with the change to UTF8 vs iso-8859-1). English posts with no special characters (ultimat, etc) can just move over (along with new installs); existing installs that may have extended character sets will have to either set their charset accordingly in the general language file or migrate their data from iso-8859-1 to UTF8.

I believe Isaac talked about a content rebuilder to do the conversion, and I've been using "mb_convert_encoding($fetch["TOPIC_LAST_POSTER_NAME"], "UTF-8", "iso-8859-1")" with my CMS code to pull data and have it display correctly; I'm sure that either way there will be a migration tool (even if I have to write something standalone, using the code bit above).


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Thank you Giz (and of course Isaac). Your efforts are much appreciated.


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