I just discovered a problem in the migration of the forum to a new server. It seems that some people's posts have special characters for apostrophes and double quotes. Any post that had one of those characters got truncated at that character.

I am curious how these characters got into the posts. I know that Microsoft Word uses them by default -- the characters are
more "curly" as you can see around that word. And the apostrophe (') has a slant to it. So if a message is composed on Word, then pasted here, that would carry the new characters over.

Here's "curly"   (Note the apostrophe, too.)
Here's "straight"

Someone tell me... If you use a Mac to post, which characters are used?

Thanks.

For an example of the problem, look at the Wilderness Permit Options post.  I can fix each post, but it will take quite some time.

Hi, Steve:

I'm on a "Mac".

Does this help?

In Word, the "curly" quotes are called "smart quotes" and the "straight" quotes are called (you guessed it) "straight quotes". Either can be used in Word, depending on your preference.

I'm guessing that "curly" quotes were developed probably to give a document that has them a little more flourish or more of a polished look than using straight quotes. But either one can be used.

Not sure why the new server would interpret one differently from the other. I'm guessing it only likes the straight quotes. Sometimes, in order to make all the double quotes in my Word document the same (and this is to make them all straight quotes), I'll do a global search-and-replace, with the double quote as both the searched for and replaced item. If you're copying and pasting from a Word document into this forum, you might want to consider doing that in order to make all your double quotes into straight quotes first.

CaT

Thanks for that, DobeMom. The Mac gave us straight quotes.

It looks like the problem started with Bill Gates trying too hard to be "smart".

CaT, I don't think there is any reason for people to edit or change their quotes on the forum. The problem only shows up when we run a database script to re-create the posts. That only occurred because we were migrating away from (off of) one server and onto a brand new server and new database. I would only need to repeat the step if the server crashed and we needed to restore the posts from a backup.

There is an Autoformat autocorrect option in Word replaces straight quotes with curly quotes. It can be turned off by the user, but the default option is enabled. I normally used WordPad because of this issue, but I occasionally used Word and maybe the last update was with Word (but it was not after the migration to the new server so that is a stretch).