Posted by Kim on February 16, 2021, 7:55am
Good morning RPR friends! I hope you're enjoying the current site speeds.
As some of you have noticed, the particular alchemy required to give us these current speeds caused Server to develop an unexpected severe allergy to "special characters," including many foreign language letters and emojis. If you try to post or save these right now, you may see an error page.
Fear not! This is a temporary condition. I'm working with poor Server to solve it. I hope we'll be done with this inconvenience by tomorrow.
So many of you have done the right thing and reported this condition that I'm not able to give individual updates on your bug reports until closure, so I'm going to try and keep this post updated throughout the day when I have news.
I so appreciate all of you for your patience and kindness.
- 8:30am: I'm testing various cures on test servers to try and avoid more unintended side effects on Server.
- 10am: Taking a break for breakfast.
- 11am: Back at work.
- 12:58pm I'm slowly administering some of the most promising cures on Server. You should already be able to use emojis & etc. in inbox conversations again without causing a reaction.
- 1:12pm: User statuses should be able to accept special characters again.
- 1:33pm: Guestbooks, kudos and news comments should accept special characters again.
- 1:59pm: You should now be able to update character widgets with special characters again.
- 2:05pm Character names, taglines, widgets and journals should now accept special characters again.
- 2:11pm: Group announcements, events, and widgets should now accept special characters again.
- 2:19pm: The bulk of cures have been applied, but I'm keeping an eye on the error log in case I've missed an area. This means that you should not be seeing errors from new posts or saving widgets that include special characters any longer. However, there are still going to be remaining "hives" from past allergic reactions. If you wish, you may start going in and correcting these on your own now. I'm turning my attentions to healing as many of these as I reasonably can as well, so if you want to wait a day or two and see if your special characters fix themselves, that's a fine strategy too!
- 3:00pm: Accidentally crashed the site for 30 seconds WHOOPS. All better now. Creating a bit of lag with my efforts to apply salve to server's existing hives, but definitely making progress.
- 4:06pm: User profiles should accept special characters again.
- 4:27pm: I've gone through kudos, character names, widget titles, user profiles, group applications, comments, block notes, group events, group announcements, and so forth and so on to try and correct as many of the corrupted characters as I could. Basic punctuation such as apostrophes and quotation marks should be back; most common foreign language characters should be back; many emojis and purely decorative characters will require you to go in and edit them back in. Sorry about that! At least we CAN again
- 4:40pm: I've closed out most of the bug reports relating to this issue. Taking a break for a late lunch, then will come back and see what new bugs you've all found
Comments
BleedingPascal
February 16, 2021
9:59pm
Amazing! As far as I know, you are the only person who handles this, I truly respect you for the patience over all these things, and that you read all the bug reports!
As far as I know, you are the only person who handles this, I truly respect you for the patience over all these things, and that you read all the bug reports!
Thank you so much for all of your tireless effort and hard work, Kim!
Thank you for your hard work, this is great. 
This community is SO sweet. You make it worth the hard work
Thank you!!!
We all appreciate your hard work!
We all appreciate your hard work!
Yay! Allergy cured 😁 Thanks!
Can we please have a badge item thinger (profile decoration?) that's specifically labeled "Server Allergy Salve" or something? 
Rogue-Scribe
February 16, 2021
12:43pm
Thanks much. Loving the speed.
The wonky characters can be edited out and replaced by the same special character and it’s fine, so server thinks any that were present at maintenance-time is a virus and sent antibodies to fight them. I’m leaving the character example I sent you alone for your test use, but I’m editing the bios where I’m finding the issue. It’s mostly the apostrophe in contractions in my stuff.
The wonky characters can be edited out and replaced by the same special character and it’s fine, so server thinks any that were present at maintenance-time is a virus and sent antibodies to fight them. I’m leaving the character example I sent you alone for your test use, but I’m editing the bios where I’m finding the issue. It’s mostly the apostrophe in contractions in my stuff.
Just a small price to pay, I'm really enjoying the faster speeds and missed that a lot from the old RPR.
Thank you for your hard work!
MasterWinter
February 16, 2021
8:50am
Fantastic and fabulous as always, Kim. Thanks a ton! ^.^
Thank you!!
Thanks for the update and for your all your hard work, Kim!
pixl.Bee
February 16, 2021
8:21am
This happened to a bit of text on my profile, but I was able to edit out the weird symbols and replace 'em with what they were before >:>
Thank you kim! Hope the server gets better from their peanut butter special character allergy. ^^
ChocolateIceCream
February 16, 2021
11:35pm