Forum updated to UTF-8

[TechAdmin]

Hello, as the title says the forum has been updated to UTF-8. This makes it so that "weird" characters such as èéëòóöàáä and similar stuff won't (shouldn't ) have problems to display anymore ("Côte d'Ivoire" in profiles, for example).
If you're wondering "that's it? Just including some characters?" it's not that simple... It makes things easier because the whole system was kind of a mix-up with lots of different charsets used, most of which outdated or not really conventional ones Other positive effects of this change are that the forum should be faster with the search feature, have some kind of better Google indexing and will make things easier for the big future upgrades.

Now the bad news. Since the database was such a mix-up the upgrade wasn't exactly smooth, there were some problems I had to solve including but not limited to a silly bug within a mod that locked the whole upgrade for a good half an hour before I could manage to track it down... I do have a backup of the database just in case, but if you do see broken topics/posts/anything strictly words-related please let me know in this topic.

Regards.

[DamonHD]

Grazie mille!

Now we are being a little more polite to the non-ASCII-speaking world!  B^>

Rgds

Damon

[JW]

I thought you were up to something today. I cant believe it went that smoothly GOOD JOB!!!!

[SparWeb]

Félicitations.
Je peux te dire combien je l'apprécie maintenant!

[MagnetJuice]

Gracias señor, ahora podemos escribir loquerías aquí. 

Ed

[MagnetJuice]

I noticed this problem:

Here is some text from a recent thread:

This is why Adriaan is not enthusiastic about VAWT's, he is showing us that he's literally done the research into all the most promising units he could find, and none have suggested promise.    It's a bit surprising that he's willing to continue to comment on this forum as it must be frustrating to watch people tilt at windmills he knocked over years ago.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Here are the words that are messed-up:

VAWT's - he's - it's

It seems that happens when the text is copied from MS-WORD and posted to the Forum.

I don't remember that happening before the UTF-8 update.

I hope that this can be corrected.

Ed

[TechAdmin]

That's... Not something I can control if people use outdated fonts outside of the forum and then copy/paste from them into utf8. I can do a workaround and add (EDIT: yeah, can't type it anymore) as censored word, turning it into "'" but that's about it really.

[JW]

There is a work around. When I insert text I use Wordpad, it works because there is no subscription but it is still a "rich text"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Text_Format

If that doesn't  work use notepad its what I do and you would be surprised how this works to not lock out text. So using notepad is completely compatible with UTF-8

[TechAdmin]

That's very true indeed
Also, go read me on skype already please.

[JW]

Thanks Flavio, the characters look great!

Can you give me a little tutorial on how to insert the characters (on skype 

[dnix71]

So this means you need to be running XP SP3 to be up-to-date here

Double-byte buffered fonts helped solve an OS security issue in Windows. Long ago when computers were slow and dumb "(640kb of ram should be enough for anyone)" BG and MS got it's office apps to run faster and render fonts faster by DCOM (distributed computing) and running font rendering in ram space. Which meant if you hacked a font you could load malware into ram and spread that to every machine on the network.

If all your fonts are double-byte (buffered if they were originally single-byte) then it is easier to protect the stack against a buffer overflow attack.

I had a friend install HP printer software with older single-byte fonts. Windows would throw an exception and place an empty file with the name of the obsolete font it would now refuse to render. it was a U with umlats over it. The friend freaked, because no matter how mant times she would delete the file, it would reappear. She thought she had a virus.

MS has always made money from it's office apps, so compromising safety for the sake of function made sense to them.

[TechAdmin]

So this means you need to be running XP SP3 to be up-to-date here