Here's a tech question I bet nobody has ever asked.

Was making some substantial edits to my Showcase, the biography section, and I added the following Gaelic phrase at the end of the write-up:

Go raibh maith agat as seo a léamh, agus tá an lá iontach!

After saving it, I found that the system had completely wiped my biography section! I almost had heart failure, but was able to press the back button to return to the original material. Thought I had done something wrong. Redid all my work, COPIED it this time, saved again, and the same thing! Totally blank bio.

Commenced some trial and error, and finally realized that the Gaelic was throwing off the system. No matter where I positioned that phrase among the paragraphs, I ended up with a blank bio. Removed the Gaelic, and my bio saved just fine.

WHY?

Btw, the phrase means, "Thanks for reading this, and have a great day!" Wasn't cussing anybody out in an unknown tongue. Pretty sure I've seen Spanish in biographies, so why not Gaelic? What difference would it make?

I really don't know why that would happen except for the reason you mentioned

the system doesn't accept gaelic

Fancy dear, did you try putting the offending phrase in quotes to see if the system would accept it that way?

I don't know why I thought of that, but I just wondered if you had tried it.

The system may be reading those accented A's as some sort of special character that results in erasing your bio. If the quote suggestion doesn't work, put the phrase in a picture file, save it as a jpg as put that in your bio.

Hope this helps, and I'm watching for an excuse to get back to Houston...

Fancy, if you can't post it in text, see if you can add it as a picture. Type the words, control print screen, paste in MS Paint. Maybe you can paste it in, maybe upload as a picture.

I doubt the Gaelic is the problem. Pyramider uses obscure languages in his signature all the time, and I've seen signatures with non-Roman characters, too.

Will try the quotes and let you know. I could post the photo in my gallery, but don't think the bio section will allow graphics. I'll see. Thanks for the suggestions!

Stand back, folks, I'm about to go full nerd on you here.

The really strange part of this is that you were able to post the text here, but not in the showcase. Even stranger is that if you right click on this page, select view source, and ctrl+f to find "Go raibh maith", the html has the actual accented characters in it. And both pages contain

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />

which means they use the same character set.

Usually, for special characters with accents that aren't in the character sets code page, you have to use special representations for accented chars. Depending on how well the site filters embedded html data, you may be able to use the codes in the page below to get the accents. It might also be worth checking if a different browser still shows the page empty as they might handle the characters differently.

http://symbolcodes.tlt.psu.edu/web/codehtml.html

If you still want to know why it doesn't work, add the text into your showcase and save it again, then (if using google chrome) open the menu and go to tools > view source and see whats different from this page and that one. I would say attach it to this post, but i don't think you can do attachments here.

just offhand it looks like you spoke the words of a great elder and what you spoke was a some curse or something... Cthlulu might appear later in your life

just offhand it looks like you spoke the words of a great elder and what you spoke was a some curse or something... Cthulhu might appear later in your life Originally Posted by Mr. GPop

I think I dated him in a past life, already. It was a weird tale.

Stand back, folks, I'm about to go full nerd on you here.

The really strange part of this is that you were able to post the text here, but not in the showcase. Even stranger is that if you right click on this page, select view source, and ctrl+f to find "Go raibh maith", the html has the actual accented characters in it. And both pages contain

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />

which means they use the same character set.

Usually, for special characters with accents that aren't in the character sets code page, you have to use special representations for accented chars. Depending on how well the site filters embedded html data, you may be able to use the codes in the page below to get the accents. It might also be worth checking if a different browser still shows the page empty as they might handle the characters differently.

http://symbolcodes.tlt.psu.edu/web/codehtml.html

If you still want to know why it doesn't work, add the text into your showcase and save it again, then (if using google chrome) open the menu and go to tools > view source and see whats different from this page and that one. I would say attach it to this post, but i don't think you can do attachments here. Originally Posted by goodtimes

Ye Gods, after I decipher this I'll try it, as nothing else has worked. I use Mozilla Firefox, however.

trying to one up the full-tilt geek...

I'll bet it's the backend engine rendering the showcase - given the error was so easy to back out (and not recreate your bio) it doesn't sound like it actually destroy the content. So if you are really bored, try repeating the same string, but start with just one character, save, view, then add the next character, save, view... You'll likely hit something that blows it up. Now, back out and use only that character. Still blows it up, tell us. If that doesn't work, try the last two characters entered as perhaps you've found some character combination that the rendering engine can't/won't parse.

Either way, once we know the character or characters that break the engine, we can figure out a cool way around it.

Finally, the rendering engine is doing formatting (justification/indentation at a minimum) it may literally be a case of adding or removing a single character to make it a smidge shorter or longer.

This is clearly REALLY important stuff we're solving for here!

This is clearly REALLY important stuff we're solving for here! Originally Posted by Luv4Fun

If you're like me, you see something like this and you feel compelled to troubleshoot it

and I already met Cathulu, in the form of a plushy in my office (Whos a bad little Cathulu? You are, yes you are <*nose boink*>)