technical issue Special Characters Glitching Forum Software

[Rikifive 23,472]

Hello everypony,
 
I've encountered a glitch related to the forum software.
From my experience I know, that IPB doesn't handle special characters very well.
By special characters I mean various symbols and emojis coming from the depths of the Windows' Character Map etc..
 
I know, that it's possible to easily corrupt things here and there to make them not view-able anymore.
However, I didn't know about this one, because I haven't tried that yet.

 

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What's wrong?
I can't view messages when clicking the letter icon to open the messenger.
It opens, but it gets stuck loading forever and eventually closing back.
 
How does it look like?
The conversation's topic looks like this:

Basically, these are unsupported by forum characters/symbols.
The forum replaces these with <?> symbols, that cause issues later on.
 
Now when I'll click the letter icon on the panel, I can only see that loading.gif :

~And nothing can be loaded. This pony keeps going and going.
 
Is there any workaround?
Yes, there is.
I can always right-click the letter icon and open it in a new tab.
That opens the Messenger Screen, where it shows all conversations:

 

Everything works as it should from there.

 

Solution

Deleting this conversation solved the issue, as simply it removed the special characters from the list, so they don't have to be loaded anymore.

 

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Sorry for bothering; thanks for reading,

~Rikifive

Edited October 25, 2016 by Rikifive

[Kenshiro 13,492]

You have touched upon a beautiful point. The most common issue that i met is having the same constantly moving pony problem on the notification tab. I found the only solution that when this happened, i always have refreshed the page and the problem is generally being solved. This also happens when the network connection is too slow. About the other problems that you have mentioned are very rarely problems that i have met. I hope i could be helpful

[Rikifive 23,472]

The issue still persists even after few days, so refreshing isn't going to help.

Internet connection isn't the case either. 

 

 

I'm pretty sure it's caused by what I've described.

I left that message in my messenger in case if administrators would like to try some troubleshooting, that would prevent from future issues like this, though I suspect, that nothing can be done, so in that case I'll simply solve the issue by deleting that bugged message. Everything is alright, I'm just reporting, that such an issue exists, because that information may be helpful, when other members will encounter the same issue, but will not know why it happens.

 

As for the other issues - I've experienced them many times as I was glitching the (other) forums myself. ~ Though it's not what you may think ~ When I've experienced the glitch once, then I was investigating that issue to recreate that problem to be aware of possible solutions and source of trouble, when other members would be encountering/reporting these.   Same as other glitches of IPB. Version 3 had another one related to BBCode - the whole (thread) page was formatted wrongly, when a specific combination of BBcode was put to one of the posts.

~ So it was better to take my experiments to the corner, than try to help others while not knowing anything myself. (Also to know, if somebody breaks these on purpose) :3

Generally it's a pretty common glitch, though most of the members don't even realize, that they've just broke something. 

 

Though that's nothing relevant - it's just how that forum software was written.

Edited October 23, 2016 by Rikifive

[Rikifive 23,472]

As I thought - the issue can be solved simply by deleting the 'corrupted' conversation.

I've updated the main post with the solution.

 

Everything is back to normal.

This thread can be locked.

 

Again, sorry for bothering. Hopefully it will be helpful for some ponies.