2015 "Software" Changes "Problems"

[Essexboy Fisher]

Hello, I don't know where to query problems like this. There seem to have been some some "software" changes on the forum. My posts that contain "quote marks" and "apostrophes" appear now to have "computer code" replacing those grammatical marks. Am I imagining the problem or is it only on my computer?
Yours
Fishless's problems

[dognose]

Hi Fishless's problems,

No, the problem is not just confined to yourself. We are currently upgrading the forum and hopefully these gremlins will be ironed out soon.

Trev.

[davidross]

Speaking of software problems, the crumbling of apostrophes and commas into what appears to be ASCII code is nothing compared to the loss of Asian characters. As I am not experiencing this problem with any other web pages, I believe this is not a problem confined locally to my computer, but must be part of the same problem with coding the punctuation on the 925-1000 site.

Over the course of the past 4 years, I have spent several hundred hours uploading Chinese and Japanese characters into my responses to queries and into Contributors' Notes. Other contributors may have done the same. To replicate that amount of work would take the same amount of time again.

Incidentally, I notice that the same coding problem has not occurred with Cyrillic.

Without the Asian characters restored, many of these posts are now nothing more than unintelligible gibberish and an invaluable resource is rendered largely meaningless, not only for those of us who can read the characters, but even for those who cannot but could at least do a visual comparison between the inputted characters and the marks on their silver objects.

As hundreds and hundreds of Asian characters look nearly identical, it is nearly impossible to answer queries and discuss some Asian marks without the use of Asian characters.

If there are changes afoot to upgrade the site, perhaps this would also be an excellent opportunity to divide the monolithic catch-all of Asian and Middle Eastern Silver into separate sections, and to separate Asian Silver into subsections that make sense geographically, historically, and culturally. Doing so would ensure that the Forum becomes an even more useful resource in its second decade.

David Ross

[dognose]

Hi David,

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us.

Please be assured that a great deal of work is currently being carried out to remedy this situation. We all share your frustration, but hopefully the problem will be resolved very soon, so please bear with us in the meantime.

Trev

[davidross]

Many thanks, Trev.

I am relieved to know that Asian characters will eventually return to the site. In the meanwhile, I will refrain from including them in my posts.

Cheers

David

[oel]

Dear Administrators,


Since the upgrade of the Forum, the Forum Index page format has changed. People using an iPhone or smart phone only see half of the Index Forum page without the TOPICS, POSTS and LAST POST. The Forum upgrade has made the use of an iPhone or smart phone to access the Forum completely useless. Could we please look into this matter?

Best wishes,

Oel.

[user701]

I just want chip in, when I used my phone to look up some French makers marks a couple of weeks ago, it was only showing part of a page roughly about three or four hallmarks per 'letter', not sure if it would be the same for other countries. Not sure if the software changes also affected the other parts of the site, not just the forum.

[user701]

I just want chip in, when I used my phone to look up some French makers marks a couple of weeks ago, it was only showing part of a page roughly about three or four hallmarks per 'letter', not sure if it would be the same for other countries. Not sure if the software changes also affected the other parts of the site, not just the forum.

Sorry, should have been three or four makers mark per 'letter' not hallmarks

[admin]

Dear Members,

Thank you for your patience with the various forum problems experienced over the last several weeks. At this point in time, most have been addressed, many resolved and others are still works in progress.

Foreign alphabetic characters and punctuation:
The new version of the forum supports Asian and Cyrillic fonts and they should render correctly in any current/future posts. The characters that were corrupted in all pre-upgrade posts are being manually recoded.
Thus far, all pre-March 2015 posts containing Asian characters have been recoded to render properly.
Cyrillic rendering problems have been corrected as far back as Sept. 2012 and the work is ongoing to correct the balance.
There is no doubt that I have missed some posts that will need correction. Please feel free to send me a PM with the url of any message that I have missed and I will be happy to recode it. (this applies to all Asian character problems, any Cyrillic problems after Oct.2012, and any Arabic, Urdu, etc.. from any time - punctuation alone is not being addressed at this time)

Main website French section rendering on smartphones:
Sorry, I've not been able to recreate your issue, the French makers' section, as well as the rest of the site, renders completely on both of the smartphones I have access to. However, it is somewhat slow, initially just 4 or 5 listings, but the page fills out after a couple of seconds. Unfortunately, our website structure is old an outdated, the code was originally written for desktop use in the pre-smartphone era. We hope to have the main site rebuilt, later this year, to behave more responsively on smartphones and tablets.

Forum on smartphones:
Apologies for the delay in fixing the half-page issue, I'd thought it resolved 3 weeks ago and did not realize further file editing was needed until your mention in this post. It should now be rendering full screen, but it may take a couple of days before the corrected version is updated in your device cache. If it continues beyond that please let me know.
Must admit that I preferred the old version where the forum rendered the same on a phone as it did on a desktop, however, the upgrade was needed to stay compliant with google guidelines and to do so we had to take the phpBB software as is, lock, stock & barrel. Hopefully it will grow more comfortable with time.

Regards, Tom

[user701]

I will try again later using the international sections looking for hallmarks / makers marks etc to check again, maybe it was just a glitch that particular day I was looking.

[user701]

I tried again just now, it was ok, must have been a glitch that particular day I was looking.

[oel]

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the explanation and all the good work you have done. I am afraid the Forum half-page issue on smart phones is persistence and still exists today.

Regards,

Peter

[admin]

Hi Peter,

I've checked and re-checked, all instances of the string of code that was causing the 1/2 page issue have been edited out. As my phone no longer has the issue, I suspect that your device may just be stubborn about refreshing its cache. If the problem still persists, you should be able to help it along by clearing the phone's internet cache, this will make your device call up the freshest version of the site. Here is a quick tutorial on how to clear a phone's cache.
https://help.yahoo.com/kb/browsers-cach ... 14733.html
Please let me know if this helps.

Regards, Tom