Bugs Non-ASCII characters being replaced with question marks

[packbat]

We were rereading Coded and noticed that, in the chat sections where some of the characters signed their messages with emoji, those emoji were missing and replaced with question marks. Something similar seems to have happened in the comments sections - from context, I'm guessing not all transformed characters are emoji, although I have no records.

Non-ASCII ellipses and dashes seem to have been preserved in the story we posted yesterday, so it's possible this is an effect of some technical change?

 

[kelmor]

I saw the same thing in my story. Pretty sure during the recent downtime there was a database migration or backup/restore that failed to encode text properly. Either way, I fixed the emoji in my own story and it seems to have stayed fixed for now.

 

[packbat]

Pretty sure during the recent downtime there was a database migration or backup/restore that failed to encode text properly.

That makes a lot of sense - looking at the activity page for someone who uses a lot of emoji (it feels weird to link to them directly given that this isn't about them), it looks like comments from morning US Eastern on January 18 and before are affected, and from morning US Eastern on January 19 and after are unaffected. Does that line up with a downtime or backup/restore?

 

[kelmor]

Yes, see https://forum.scribblehub.com/threads/error-establishing-a-database-connection.14393/page-4

 

[packbat]

Ooo - that'd probably be really indicative to someone who knew what was up with that downtime! I wonder if PHP changed its handling of non-ASCII characters or something.

 

[kelmor]

My guess is they just had to dump the db to a file so they could bring it up elsewhere and didn’t get the encoding right.