Today in multiple game, my character descriptions stopped displaying. If I try to Edit the descriptions, all of the information is there.

<game links removed>

I believe those are the only three that are broken. Did I do something?
This message was last edited by a moderator, as it was against the forum rules, at 02:26, Wed 12 Oct 2016.

Did a little testing. For one of my characters the problem seems to be special characters. He is Hispanic and I was using proper spelling of various names.

Ángel Raymond Quiñones Castellano vs. Angel Raymond Quinones Castellano

For example. The first seems to break the description.

The special characters aren't used in the other two games however.

The problem is affecting more than just your game.  Hopefully jase will have a chance to look at soon.

Okay, thanks! I tried looking for other posts on this, but didn't see any.

In your other games, you may also want to check the single- and double-quotes if there are any in the description. If they're angled, reenter them with the normal straight ones.

Thanks to your observation, once I noticed that and changed them, the descriptions came back. Good Luck.

I should have looked here first before rMail !  <grins>

Yes, we've had a few reported issues ... and blackargentina seems to have the right of it ...

It appears the problem is the characters used for ' and " - RuBB doesn't seem to like the smart quotes or fancy characters or whatever you want to call them - if you replace them using the standard keys on the keyboard the affected description/sheet should display correctly.

Nothing's changed on RPoL ... it's possible that some Windows/browser or other system update has changed a font file which is no longer compatible with RuBB.  Could even be an update on the RPoL host server's software ?  Anyways at least we seem to have a fix. <fingers crossed>

Cheers :>

Skald

I'd also like to add that it is not just the quotes and double quotes that aren't  being liked.

If you're having this issue, try removing any special characters, 'emojis', bullet points or the like and see if that fixes the problem.

Yup, just found another one where it didn't like the en/em - fine after replaced with normal hyphen.  So as Shannara says, problem seems to be with any non-standard characters.  And I'm not talking undead paladins !  :>

ISO codes seem to work just fine ... I've added a listing of them in Heaven - Gaming Resources for those who are feeling brave and can't do without them - ISO Entities

This seems to be working for a few people but a couple of others not, I'm changing all the things you all are mentioning here but I can't seem to get a couple of them to return to normal so we can view them, any ideas here?

Unfortunately, some people have character descriptions that are ... more a book chapter than a paragraph or two.

While I admire the creativity, after playing with one of these huge ones, I've found that I can take the sheets part by part and retype in the punctuation (apparently even certain commas and periods are not liked) and get them to show up.

If you used a word processing program of some sort to type your text in, there is a possibility that it is using a font symbol that is not currently supported.

For those complex sheets, a work around might be for the game's GM to make a thread where everyone can post their sheet until there is a fix.

Otherwise, you can remove special characters and retype the punctuation and once you find all the culprits, the sheet will show.

If you typed your character sheet in the browser and didn't copy/paste from somewhere else (even somewhere on the web) then your description -- I think -- should be fine.

I have to remove smart quotes and etc. regularly for work. You can also try copy/pasting the whole thing into a basic text editor, then copy/pasting from the text editor back to wherever it needs to go. If it's a basic enough text editor, it'll clean off the fancy characters for you.

Welp I tried the text editor thing on this one and still no bio has shown up so I'm at a total loss here as to what it is with these two bios, it's a player I know posts from his phone so idk what it could be when I've changed the entire bio's text to a normal thing and it should have no problems ugh

I tried that with a basic Windows 7 text document.  It wasn't basic enough. :/

The problematic description do not show up in the source of the page, as if the server do not sent it to the browser.

In my case, a é was the problem. The funny thing is that if I use the html code (& eacute;) the description show up correctly, if I edit again, the html code is replace by the letter (with the accent), and if I save, my description disappear again.

Well my cogm went through and found the word naive was causing an uproar so it has been fixed on the two I was having issue with

For me when I put in the code for the characters, in the description, I see the code, not the characters. When I edit it again, the code resolves into the special characters and if I save it, my description is broken again.

I could see two of the descriptions just fine.  The third was still blank, until I removed two special characters from it that you had presumably missed.  Now all three of them are visible to me.

Sorry, I was working through updating my descriptions one at a time. I appreciate all the assistance from the moderators regarding this issue.

Link to a fix that worked for one user:

link to a message in this forum

What if you have none of those programs and no text editor either. None of my description are working except for one, and all my others are in the same format.

I'm not entirely sure it'll work, but I searched plain text online and came up with editpad.org.

EDIT:
If you have a blogspot, you can paste it in a blog post, select it, click the T_x button, and copy the results to RPoL
This message was last edited by the user at 00:20, Thu 13 Oct 2016.

In reply to PrincessCrystal (msg # 22):

In Windows you just need to use Notepad which is built into windows and the other is built into the MacOS X (all versions) so you shouldn't need any additional software.
This message was last edited by the user at 01:49, Thu 13 Oct 2016.

Oh my goodness this is a headache, I just went through one description and removed and changed what I could find but it is still not showing up. I just gave up for now on it. At least that seems to be the only part that it is affecting.

I would say it's server side, because the text do not show up in the browser at all: it's not in the source for the view page.

Also, using the iso code seam to work the first time, but then they are converted back to problematic characters. So a second edit would cause the problem again

In reply to prophacyks (msg # 25):

A fix was found that would resolve your issue with the character descriptions link to a message in this forum

In reply to iromanah (msg # 24):

Yeah problem is I'm on a tablet, I don't have windows or Mac nor any text programs on it.

I have found that in order to fix this, I have had to replace quotes ("), single quote/apostrophes ('), dashes (-) and any accented letters. As Skald said in msg# 7 above: "...if you replace them using the standard keys on the keyboard the affected description/sheet should display correctly."

It does take careful screening to find the incompatible characters/punctuation on the longer description pages. There was one that I had to read through four times before I found that an accented letter e was the final culprit. My description pages are displaying correctly as I replace the characters mentioned.

Several of my descriptions are blank. I'm not going to do anything unless requested by the Moderators.

Just had one of my players report this problem, as well...

And his character description hasn't changed in...oh...over a year, maybe longer, I think (I don't remember exactly when he joined the game.)  I'll ask him if he recently made any changes, and send him a link to this thread, but I've already rMailed the mods about it, as well.

Something that may be related: I copied my game introduction for my latest game from a word document and the intro isn't displaying correctly.

I haven't changed the character's description in that game since, I believe, August 2011.

In reply to Shannara (msg # 8):

Hey, I'm gonna tell you the ', " issue is not the problem.. I have multiple characters that use  ', and "..all through their descriptions .. and some are displaying just fine.. but I have several character description and character details that WILL NOT display.  If it were a ', " issue ...would it not be consistent across the board?!?

Please help!

Did the same thing.. NO DICE!

I tried THIS too! No Dice!

It is the issue, even if the ' and the " looks the same, they are not.  ANY punctuation is suspect, as I found a sheet yesterday that ',' and '.' had to be redone before it would show up in the character description.  Things like the ^TM symbol, bullet points (the little circle), etc. also cause issues.

--------------------------------------

There are these choices at the moment if a character description is not showing:

1) Wait until jase has time to look at the issue (timeframe unknown)

2) Create a thread in game and post the character descriptions there until there is a fix available

3) Retype the sheets  -- either in part, or replacing all the special characters, and using only your keyboard, not copy and paste.  If you can find a text editor that will remove the formatting, that may work as well.

--------------------------------------

If your description is large, you can do what I did to test the issue yesterday:

Copy and paste the sheet elsewhere.

Copy back just one small section of it in the character description.  Save.  See if it shows up.  If it does not, replace the special characters and punctuation by typing over them.  Save.  If that doesn't work, retype the section and save -- and I do mean a full 'retype' -- characters copied and pasted from Word or the internet or other programs may LOOK exactly the same, but there is a difference the field recognizes even if our eyes do not.

Copy another section, and repeat with that section.

If you've got a giant character sheet with loads of formatting, it will be a PITA to do, so I'd suggest posting the description in an in game thread, and waiting to see if jase will be able to fix.
This message was last edited by the user at 11:23, Thu 13 Oct 2016.

I had to do this for the last couple lines of a Game Introduction I pasted from my PDF.

For info: accented characters trigger the problem as well. I put née in a description and it went blank.

Yeah, that's what actually prompted this thread. The special punctuation was discovered during troubleshooting.

Hokay ... take two on a workaround.  A little convoluted but might just work.

1) You'll need to find and install an add-on to copy plain text without special characters.  One I found for Firefox is Copy Plain Text 2 - make sure you set up Option to Reformat Special characters.   I believe there's an extension called Copy as Plain Text for Chrome.

The problem I then had (on Firefox, your mileage may differ) was that the right click context menu didn't show the copy as plain text option when I selected the text in the edit field for character description.  So ...

2) Turn your browser tab into a a basic text editor:

Open a blank tab, type the following into the address bar and press enter (works in Firefox, supposed to work for Chrome and Opera, supposed NOT to work for IE):

data:text/html, <body contenteditable style="font: 2rem/1.5 monospace;max-width:60rem;margin:0 auto;padding:4rem;">

NB: I saved this as a Favourite to make life easier.

THEN ... click anywhere on the blank webpage and you'll get a flashing cursor ... manually copy and paste the text from character description ... then right click on the inserted text and use the Copy as plain text which should now appear ... back to description and replace old faulty text with clipboard contents (CTRL+V is my go to) ... save, view ... and it should be there !

<fingers crossed>

Sources:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5...ing-copy-paste-text/
http://www.pcworld.com/article...sic-text-editor.html

Skald's solution above worked for me.
I use Firefox.
Like he said, make sure you select the "reformate special characters" option from the Copy Plain Text 2 options.

It didn't seem to want to 'copy as plain text' when I deselected the "remove extra empty lines" option. I didn't look deep into this though.

It's a nuisance, but it seems to work. Once you do it once the next times are easier.

For us 'international' folk, the £ sign triggers this issue too :)

Unfortunately the fix is to remove all of the characters that trigger the bug. While this is an inconvenience for me, for people running games not in English, it could be crippling.

As far as I can tell, any character not found on a standard American QWERTY keyboard causes the Character Description field to not display. All my testing shows that this is an issue on the web host side. I've used older browsers as well as updated browsers and all see the same behavior. Looking at the page source shows a mostly empty page.

I know Skald said the ISO Codes work just fine. But they don't for me. I put them in a description and save it. When I look at the description, I see the actual code not the appropriate character. If I then edit the description again, the browser renders the code into the description and if I save it, the Character Description stops displaying again.

I hadn't thought of doing this with the wiki pages I can't access. Turns out I get the same result -- a bunch of header information, and nearly nothing in the 'body' tags. Because the editing links are nonexistent, I can't even try to get in to the original text to find offensive characters. I can't even go into it and recreate the page from scratch.

Until this is fixed, at least half of my game's wiki is empty.

Yup, you're right ... it does work the first time (I posted the entire listing as it shows on the Heaven thread into my character description in one my games and it rendered perfectly), but as soon as you try to edit it the ISO code is changed into the appropriate character ... and the description vanishes because it's no longer an ISO code and thus no longer valid.

Probably needs a tweak to the Edit code to stop it converting, once jase gets time to do that ... in the meantime, best workaround would be to keep a plain text file copy of the description offline (Notepad file or somesuch) and edit that file offline as needed then replace description with the updated version.

Just to share what I did to get my description working again.

I copied the description and saved it on notepad.  Somehow, I figured out if I typed it in, it would work.  But anything I copied from notepad doesn't work.

And then, I copied everything on notepad to microsoft word.  Then, I copied the text from microsoft word to my description and .... voila.  All back.

GMail has that same T_x button too, in the compose message window. Click the A that's next to the Send button, then it's at the far right of the popup ribbon.

Some of my profiles have fixed themselves while I was offline recently... or has this problem been addressed behind the scenes?

Should be better now.  Stupid upgrade to PHP changed the default, which brokes it.

*standing ovation*