Older Posts Not Displaying Correctly?

[Link83]

Not sure if this is related to the server failure last August or not, but I recently noticed a number of older posts are no longer displaying correctly. For instance check out the first post of this thread:-
https://nfggames.com/forum2/index.php?topic=3574.0

Or a number of posts part way down this page:-
https://nfggames.com/forum2/index.php?topic=4393.400

If you click 'quote' on any of these 'missing' posts you can see that the text is still there, only its not visable from the thread.

It looks like certain characters/symbols in certain posts are not being displayed correctly, and rather than display the post with the misinterpreted characters/symbols it just displays no post at all?

Hope its not too difficult to fix

[kendrick]

I've seen this before in other forums. I can't tell what the source text is because I don't have access to the database myself, but I'm guessing that the encoding is something oddball like JIS or Cyrillic or Klingon or something, and it's not converting to Western EU or Unicode properly. So the forum code gets to the first character, can't decode the text, and then gives up and just displays an empty box before moving on to the next post. That's why the text still shows up when you go to quote the post for a reply, because the code for creating a post doesn't have the same problem.

[NFG]

Yup, that seems to be the case.  There's nothing visibly wrong with the content of those old posts, but since the DB and forum were both long ago converted to UTF-8, the usual automated fixes have already failed and I don't know of any way to fix them en masse.

[kendrick]

If nobody objects, I can make time to edit those posts manually to make all of the content visible. It'll be one at a time and not structured or planned in any way. If anybody would like to point out posts where this issue is occurring, feel free to cite them in this thread or PM me directly.

[kendrick]

Okay, so I've experimentally made edits to the two threads that Link83 previously cited, and it looks like it might have worked. In most cases I didn't strip out any funny characters, so it's possible that you'll see little placeholder characters displayed where non-ASCII punctuation or letters would go. Let me know if, as a group, everybody's okay with us doing this going forward on an as-needed basis.