Weird Characters in posts.

[viper357]

I'm starting to have an issue on my forum (3.8.5) whereby some posts are having certain characters being changed, things like ', ", - are being changed into this:

***8220;Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.***8221;
***8213; Winston Churchill

Whereas it should be:

"Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm."
- Winston Churchill

But it's not happening to all posts, only some. I've been searching the net and reading on vb.com but it's above my understanding. I have picked up on what I think may be the problem, but I don't know, and that's the character setting? Here are some screenshots that I have taken after reading various threads on vb.com

Can anybody see anything wrong anywhere? Thanks.

This is one of the posts:



The settings on the first page at phpmyadmin



The collation column when I select my database in phpmyadmin



The Character set in vb admincp



Character set and collation from vb admincp



I don't really know what any of this all means so hoping someone can pick up on something that is incorrect?

For the time being I have had to use the Replacement Variable Manager to fix this, but I'd prefer to fix the issue properly, thank you.

[kh99]

Did you change them to *** at the beginning or did they appear like that? If they were &# instead of ***, then they'd be left and right double quote characters and I guess a long dash for 8213, and it would appear correctly. So maybe you have something changing &# to *** or something like that? Maybe check your censored words to see if you have anything like that in there.

[Max Taxable]

I assume this example is from a post that had copy/paste involved.

[viper357]

Originally Posted by kh99

Did you change them to *** at the beginning or did they appear like that? If they were &# instead of ***, then they'd be left and right double quote characters and I guess a long dash for 8213, and it would appear correctly. So maybe you have something changing &# to *** or something like that? Maybe check your censored words to see if you have anything like that in there.

Yes, just checked and I have &# as a censored word. I'm not sure why but I think that was due to the admin username being exploited?

Originally Posted by Max Taxable

I assume this example is from a post that had copy/paste involved.

One of the posts, yes, but not all of the posts were copy and pasted, like this one for example, I assume it is supposed to be a ? instead of the characters?

[viper357]

More on this page - http://www.marineaquariumsa.com/hard...tml#post859313

I've removed the &# from the censored words list and rebuilt the post cache, but they still remain. Guess I'll wait a couple of days to see if it occurs again. Thanks for the tip.

Strange though how it's only on some posts and not all?

[kh99]

Originally Posted by viper357

More on this page - http://www.marineaquariumsa.com/hard...tml#post859313

I've removed the &# from the censored words list and rebuilt the post cache, but they still remain. Guess I'll wait a couple of days to see if it occurs again. Thanks for the tip.

Strange though how it's only on some posts and not all?

The censoring happens before the posts are saved, so it's permanent even if you change what's censored. The only way to fix the existing ones would be to edit the post.

It could be the reason that it only happens for some posts is that it would only happen if the post contained the html entity. If it contained a literal double quote or dash it wouldn't happen.

[viper357]

Makes sense, thank you.

[Max Taxable]

I'm a weird character myself, it's really the only reason I chimed in.