Black diamonds in stories

[BronxWench]

51 minutes ago, Hypnomaster87 said:

Nope nothing. Wish we could download stories. Be a big help. 

There is a possibility that the upgrade to php7 might have affected the way browsers read the encoding. The end goal is to convert everything to a standard encoding (utf8, if I’m not mistaken). However, given that we are an all-volunteer staff, and RL has been biting hard for most of us the past couple of years, it’s going to take a while for our tech admin to go through each story/chapter to manually convert the text to the proper format.

As to downloading of stories, as someone who mostly writes original content, I would strongly object to any such feature being added to the site. Personally, I think all plagiarists should be flayed, salted, rubbed with honey, and staked out atop a fire ant colony, but that’s me.

[Desiderius Price]

On 5/19/2022 at 6:46 PM, BronxWench said:

There is a possibility that the upgrade to php7 might have affected the way browsers read the encoding. The end goal is to convert everything to a standard encoding (utf8, if I’m not mistaken). However, given that we are an all-volunteer staff, and RL has been biting hard for most of us the past couple of years, it’s going to take a while for our tech admin to go through each story/chapter to manually convert the text to the proper format.

As to downloading of stories, as someone who mostly writes original content, I would strongly object to any such feature being added to the site. Personally, I think all plagiarists should be flayed, salted, rubbed with honey, and staked out atop a fire ant colony, but that’s me.

UTF-8 rocks, saying that as a coder.  You can’t tell the difference when it’s English, pretty minimal overhead in the related European languages, and able to handle all the languages.  Main drawback is if you’re dealing mostly in the asian languages, it’ll be a bit larger in file/data size than UTF-16.

[Guest Bob]

If the default Unicode UTF-8 is creating problems, and causing all those encoding errors, wouldn’t it be much better to have the site’s global stylesheet be set to Western instead since that encoding option solves it?

Or have it be a user setting so people can choose which one to use without having to bother with an extension and setting it for every story with encoding errors, which quite a lot have.
Not to mention, a lot of mobile browsers don’t allow extensions at all.

[Guest Bob]

Better yet.
Just leave the site preference blank instead of enforcing one, so whatever browser people are using can select the appropriate one on its own.