So I posted a topic of this title yesterday, took me an hour to type, and then it disappeared, so let's try again.

He poots forth a quarter-ounce green rosette...



In my vacation, BF and I spent three days working on the forum, which has been a major process. I wanted to share more about what has been happening.

In 2021, we had a forum crash that lasted for a few days. The issue was at our host Godaddy's end.

What had happened is that the forum language conversion had changed from UTF-8 to Latin-1.

If that's all Greek to you, it's a way of storing "special" characters in the database table that this forum uses. The builder of this forum, a then-14-year-old American, was probably not expecting that his little programme would be used for decades to come by people on 3 continents. UTF-8 contains all normal letters, but special characters, like accent aigu/grave/circonflexe in French, Umlauts in German, even the occasional Dutch trema and Czech accidentals, are coded in a different way than in Latin-1.

When the forum crashed and was moved in 2021, the language set changed, so that all accidentals that had been posted up to that point, have turned into weird combinations of random symbols.

Fast forward to 2026.

DED contacted GoDaddy after he found that the yearly fee for the site had become a monthly fee, on account of us using PHP4 instead of a more modern version. Put before the choice of either upvrade or cough up the dough, it's not surprising he upgraded PHP4.

The Goose worked for a few more days, and then, pfff, gone. She was gone for more than a month.

Now the Goose is humble, aimple, and with its mostly transient but never very large population a mere footnote in the world of Zappa - but she contains a large amount of hand-translated FZ interviews with no other backup, a full translated booklet, and photo- and trip reports and concert reviews. I aim to keep her complete and in shape, so it was pretty sure to learn that she had fully disappeared.

After a month, a proper upgrade to a more recent XMB version, we were back up and running.

But something was missing.

Approximately 500 posts.

In addition, many of the smileys broke and there are still countless symbols that are being displayed incorrectly.



The disappeared posts turn out to be related to the language conversion. Somehow, many posts with special symbols were deleted. This includes the British Pound symbol - literally every post including the GBP symbol disappeared - letters with accidentals, en dash, em dash (short and lon stripes indicating a side note in a sentence, like the "literally every post including the GBP symol disappeared" above.
Also quotation marks - there are straight quote marks, but also marks that open and close and that are a wee bit askew, and our friends in France use << and >> - which also appeared in a quote from a website somewhere.

Once I quipped I was going to write a thesis on the use of the ellipsis (...) in forums. But an ellipsis is not necessarily three dots. It can also be a symbol of one character containing three dots, or a symbol of two dots and a third dot.

And alas, even the humble apostrophe is the crux of the biscuit. A significant amount of posts were lost because there is not one, but 5, yes 5, different apostrophes used on the forum.

The main victims of the Conversion Conschmersion Crash in late April were posts by Polydigm that contain an apostrophe. A number of them were removed. Also, Plook had the habit of using Em Dash instead of a minus in his Plook on Tour posts - these were deleted too.

Quotes from books and magazines also disappeared, such as my complete topics on Wuthering Heights and Max Havelaar.

Other victims are Gojira's posts containing pound symbols and Badchild's posts where he either mentioned the Ardèche or Montréal.

It was a herculean task for BF and me to catalogue all the issues, fix the odd special symbols, and to find a way to recover the disappeared posts. We are not finished by far, but we decided to restore the missing posts from an older database and put these back on the forum as quickly as we could.

We are working on a way to replace the symbols with a consistent replacemets, so that all apostrophes are created equal and, for a future update, we don't have to worry about that going wrong.

There's no need for you to go to your posts and change them all to correct the symbols.

If you have any questions about the things we're pulling out of the fire or about what we're doing with the Goose, let us know!

BF pointed out that there were still some errors in my article. One is that the original language is UTF-MB3. The 3 means that special symbols are stored as a maximum of 3 characters.

He's currently hard at work getting the post up to code, so we can upgrade to version 10 without losing any content. Today he found another issue - apparently one user is using different smileys than our board has.

With the last conversion, most of the smileys we had in our content have disappeared. DED is not keen to reinstall them as there were hundreds of them that we never used anyway. :bald: But in more recent versions of encoding, smileys have become so mainstream they are different characters on their own, and are not posted in the way we expect you to post smileys (BB-Code) This causes another letter conversion issue for him.

Soo let's send him some positive vibes. <3

We managed to implement Phase III of the Great Goose Rescue - meaning now all the posts with Special Symbols are fixed. If you go to Chit Chat and look for the topic suggesting we should give 300 billion in frozen Russian funds to Ukraine - this initially had strange symbols in the topic title, but this has been fixed so the intended euro symbol shows.

Also, we fixed the smileys to all be written in BB Code.

Up next are the conversion from UTF to Latin 1 of all posts, so the last upgrade can go well, and the restoration of approximately 50 U2U files that disappeared.

well done

I'm impressed Bonny great job!