Forum updated

[thomas]

Dear valued members,

we have just updated to the latest version of the forum software and apologise for the brief forum closure. If you happen to come across any glitches or errors, kindly post them right here.

Thanks for your continued support!

[eeky]

Hi, in Win 7 / IE9 I am still having problems with the text insertion point (the blinking vertical bar) not being properly displayed in the edit window (the window I am typing in now). I don't know if this is a bug in IE or in the forum. I do not notice it on any other sites.

[thomas]

Hi eeky, are you referring to the cursor? I'll check it out right away.

Thanks for your feedback!

[eeky]

I'm not sure if it is technically called cursor or caret, but it's the vertical bar that shows you where the text you type will appear. When I begin typing, the vertical bar is shown correctly after the last character I type. However, if I move the text insertion point somewhere else, either via the cursor keys or via the mouse, in order to edit text that I have previously typed, then the vertical bar usually does not display. Text that I type still appears at the point that I have selected, but I do not have any visible indication of where that is on the screen, so it makes editing slightly awkward.

[thomas]

Hi eeky, I am testing this issue right now on W7/IE9, but haven't been able to reproduce it. The cursor or caret, or whatever it's called, still shows up blinking after edits. I have however experienced this problem under Firefox on other programmes. It might be related to the combination of programmes you have running in the background or even on how many server resources are available on your box at a given moment.

I'll keep on investigating and apologise for the inconvenience. I hope it's not related to vBulletin.

Update: just happened when I moved the cursor backwards. However, it reappeared once it reached the previous line.

[eeky]

Hi Thomas, this problem happens for me even with nothing else (much) running, and I have a new PC with a fairly reasonable spec, so I'd be slightly surprised if it's resource related in an obvious way. However, I have just noticed something else odd, which may or may not be helpful. In the situation where the text caret/cursor has disappeared, I can get it to reappear by moving the mouse pointer outside the edit window. However, when I move the mouse pointer back into the window, it disappears again, until I start typing. In the situation where the text caret/cursor is visible (e.g. after I've been typing), if I move the mouse pointer out of the window, and then back into the window, again it disappears.

[eeky]

If you happen to come across any glitches or errors, kindly post them right here.

If you're feeling enthusiastic about fixing bugs, here are three that have been oustanding for a long time:

1. Line breaks are lost when a post is previewed. This is the most annoying one.

2. The software inserts spaces into Japanese text (or indeed any space-free text) after every so many characters, presumably as some sort of some kludge to make line-wrapping work. Unfortunately the software does not properly understand character boundaries, meaning that it can insert a space "in the middle of a character" and thereby corrupt the text. For example, the following long string of あ's has been garbled in the middle:

(ああああああああああああああああああああああああ� �あああああああああああああああああああああ)

3. Percent signs are not displayed properly. For example 30 per cent comes out like 30%.

[Mike Cash]

The string of あああああ displays perfectly in Tapatalk, so it must be browser-related somehow.

[thomas]

eeky, I appreciate the feedback!

A lot of these issues were already raised in this thread, and, as I have just posted over there, might be related to the DB encoding. I am working on it.

[thomas]

I have just updated the forum to the latest version of the software. This was a security update, only one new feature has been added: vBulletin (or better Internet Brands, their parent company) have recently acquired Forum Runner, an application that allows users to access online fora via mobile devices, and integrated it into their software bundle.

You can now - in theory - access the forum through both Tapatalk and Forum Runner. I have also upgraded Tapatalk to their latest release.

As usual, if you find any *new* errors or glitches related to this upgrade, please report them right here. Thank you!

[eeky]

As usual, if you find any *new* errors or glitches related to this upgrade, please report them right here. Thank you!

Hi, if you already have this one then please ignore it, but I have noticed several times that links to other forum pages do not work. For example:

http://www.jref.com/forum/learning-j...1%82%F1-49324/

When I click on this link it will say "page not found", yet when I go in and edit the post, copy the text between the "url" tags, and paste it into the browser address bar, the page comes up fine.

[thomas]

Thanks for the heads-up!

That error is caused by the blasted percent symbol, which is sometimes not parsed, but replaced with its HTML entity, as shown in your link. I hope we can solve this issue once we have converted the DB to utf-8 (which I frankly admit I have no clue yet how to tackle).

[Toritoribe]

This is one of the solution for the problem, as I wrote in my post just now.

Use original Japanese thread title in the URL, then put a hyphen instead of a space and/or slash between the words in the title.

お礼の申し上げよう / いつまでも / ではないか / できん / じゃん --> お礼の申し上げよう-いつまでも-ではないか-できん-じゃん

http://www.jref.com/forum/learning-j...-じゃん-49324/

This method can work also in other Japanese sites, for instance, wikipedia.
(Thanks undrentide-san! http://www.jref.com/forum/日本語の勉強-97/...24/#post680735)

[Uncle Frank]

I don't see where you can ask a member to be your friend at their profile info area? Maybe it was never there? I have not added anyone for a while and have forgot how?

Uncle Frank



I know I can go to my friend area and do an edit friends and add it that way, maybe that was the only way to do it?

[thomas]

On the profile page, it's the first link under their avatar ("+ Add as Friend").

[Uncle Frank]

I guess some members must somehow block that area when they fill out their registration. I see it on some members but also do not see it on quite a few members.

Uncle Frank

[eeky]

Hi, there are some forum font glitches which, for me, cause the 〜 character to be incorrecly displayed as a superscript, and also cause the second character of 会社 (かいしゃ) to be incorrectly displayed as an older variant. Both characters display correctly in the edit window as I am typing them, but when I save the post they display incorrectly. Toritoribe says both display correctly for him. I am using Win 7 / IE 9 with default fonts (I have not made any changes to font settings).

See also thread:

だった / できた / まえ / 決まった用紙 / あったり

[thomas]

Fired up my IE, but couldn't reproduce that glitch on W7.

I know I sound like a broken record, but most of our mojibake-related issues stem from the fact that the forum encoding is based on Shift-JS. I have already invested many hours in trying to convert our database to UTF-8 (which in 2002, when we switched to vB, wasn't that common for PHP-based scripts), all in vain. While UTF-8 will work flawlessly on any new Japanese posts, it will turn most of our old Japanese threads into hopeless garble.

So, to anyone knowledgeable on DB conversion: if you can help, we'd be more than grateful.

Requirements: convert DB from Shift-JS -> UTF-8
Current collation: a blend of utf8_unicode_ci and latin1_general_ci

[eeky]

Fired up my IE, but couldn't reproduce that glitch on W7.

Oh well, thanks for looking. The strange thing is that the characters look fine in the edit window; it's only in the saved post that they go wrong, but in every other respect the fonts in the edit window and the saved post look identical.

---------- Post added at 04:16 ---------- Previous post was at 04:06 ----------

Requirements: convert DB from Shift-JS -> UTF-8

You'll have to forgive my probable extreme naivety, but is there not some routine available that will do that conversion? Can you not just plug that into a program to update all the existing posts to the new encoding?

[thomas]

You'll have to forgive my probable extreme naivety, but is there not some routine available that will do that conversion? Can you not just plug that into a program to update all the existing posts to the new encoding?

There are a couple of methods, most of them revolve around using a UNIX program called Iconv. While it seems to be quite easy to convert from single-byte standard encodings like ISO-8859, etc. I haven't been successful with Shift-JIS yet. It'll remain on top of my to-do list, so please bear with us.

[eeky]

No worries. None of the probable encoding-related problems that I've noticed are a very big deal. (Actually, the bug that I'd most like to see fixed is the one whereby line breaks are lost when you preview a post. Previewing is very useful to check that formatting tags, quote tags, hyperlinks etc. are all properly in order, and it's a real pain when you then discover that all your paragraphs have been run together.)

[eeky]

Hi, I have another suggestion for a minor improvement. Is there any major technical reason why the 15-character message limit exists? I usually like to thank people who have helped me, but I'm not allowed to type "Thanks" or even "Thanks <name>" for short names, I have to add some spurious characters like a line of dashes or something. I'm just wondering if that really has to be necessary?

[thomas]

No problem, I've just reduced the minimum number of characters required in a post to 6, that's a trouble-free "thanks".

[eeky]

No problem, I've just reduced the minimum number of characters required in a post to 6, that's a trouble-free "thanks".

To that, I guess I can only say "Thanks"!

[Glenn]

RE: the line break issue

I know it isn't ideal (and I have forgotten and been bitten by this bug), but my solution is to ctrl+a, ctrl+c the text before previewing (that is, select all, copy). That way I can just paste it into the edit window after preview and make changes from there. It's a lot nicer than going back in and inserting the line breaks where you're pretty sure you remember them being each time (especially as the posts get longer).