TheBang

What is the deal with missing apostrophes?

This is just one example, but the spaces in place of apostrophes is appearing in multiple posts in multiple threads over the last week or so:

Sonic

Link: https://forum.dvdtalk.com/movie-talk...l#post14156386

No such errors on my side check it...

Mobile screenshot:



Desktop screenshot:

TheBang

Yeah, it's showing up correctly for me now too. Maybe someone corrected something?

It had been showing the spaces for a couple days for me.

Edit: maybe it's being caused by some ad or something

TheBang

I scrolled up and scrolled down with auto-page loading and it was back again. Even in the page title, it's showing the ? diamond thing that indicates a text encoding issue or whatever.



Around Justice League in that post there, it's supposed to be quotation marks. In fact, it looks like the issue is with curly quotes and curly apostrophes.

Edit: OK, I did a little testing, and it looks like it happens on pages that are auto-loaded when scrolling. So, for example, for the two posts illustrated in this thread so far, #654 and #652, if you start on the last page of the thread, #27 (where those posts are located), they will look fine. However, if you started on page #26, and scrolled down to auto-load #27, they would load up with space errors in place of the curly quotes and apostrophes. Or, for example, if you started on page #27 (and everything looks OK), and scrolled up far enough such that page 27 was emptied from the scroll buffer, and then scrolled back down to page 27, they would be messed up now because it was auto-loaded.

I'm doing this on the desktop site on Chrome. I haven't tested the mobile site or other browsers.

Xander

Dang it, I just posted about this issue and then I found this . I'm having this problem too, but I see a square box instead of a blank space. Been happening for quite a while now. Also Chrome desktop.

Sonic

https://forum.dvdtalk.com/movie-talk...umors-etc.html
---------------
I'm seeing the square box too. I didn't make much of it because I thought my windows is missing a font type. Is this really a dvdtalk forum issue?

tommyp007

I also get the little box, and on Chrome desktop.

Sonic

​​​​​​I was wrong. I now see this on mobile:

IBJoel

Is everyone here accepting cookies, no content blockers? Sonic, what about mobile, but not Brave Browser?

Sonic

My post #6 screenshot was desktop using Brave browser which is Chrome engine. I'm no longer seeing the empty square.

However on Mobile, accepting cookies and disabling ad blocker I see a crossed out square as in my post #8 which is a mobile screenshot.

I tried Opera browser on mobile with ad block disabled/cookies accepted and I see the same crossed out square.

TheBang

Just to summarize what I said earlier, in case you missed it, it appears to only affect curly quotes and curly apostrophes. Straight quotes and straight apostrophes are unaffected. The blank spaces, question mark diamonds, and boxes or X boxes seem to indicate a text encoding issue.

The other required element is that the content has to be auto-loaded by the continuous scrolling feature in order to be affected. (So, Sonic, you may need to re-do your #6 post test and make sure you've auto-loaded additional pages via the continuous scrolling feature.)

This does not appear to be related to any cookies.

Sonic

I have auto scrolled from top to bottom. How strange. Today I'm not seeing the comma error (which before was showing an empty square on desktop see post #6, while on mobile it's showing a crossed out square see post #8). I'm using Brave browser on desktop which is based on Chromium. Also I'm not seeing this error with ad blocker on or off. On my mobile phones it's a different story. Both of my mobile phones showing a crossed out square in place of the comma. That's on Opera mobile browser and Brave browser.

TheBang

Did a little more testing, and the issue is less noticeable on Safari, because Safari does not put in a blank space or questionmark box when it can't render the character.

Here is an example on Safari. The first screenshot is loading directly to Page 4, so the issue doesn't appear. The second screenshot is loading to Page 3, and then auto-scrolling to page 4, with the issue appearing. You can see that the straight apostrophe in Josh's post is unaffected.

Xander

So no input on this? Still happening for me.

IBJoel

Tech says switch to the mobile skin. Typically they don't deal with issues that are on "mismatched" skins. Yes, I know many people like browsing on mobile while using the desktop skin. I get that and that it might be more comfortable for a variety of reasons.

joeblow69

Just an FYI, I was getting this on my mac, using chrome for a while ... it just stopped a couple weeks ago for me. Definitely didn't have anything to do with mismatched skins.

TheBang

This is not a desktop/mobile skin issue. Perhaps you're confusing this issue with the other thread?

Please look at the reports in this thread. There are plenty of screenshots of desktop skin on desktop computers. It's cross-browser, cross-platform, cross-skin.

IBJoel

No, sorry I sent them the most recent screenshots, which appeared to be on mobile.

You aren't running any content/media blockers are you?

joeblow69

Are you guys loading apostrophes from ad servers??

joeblow69

I just had it in the Hocus Pocus 2 thread (Mac OSX and Chrome):

I hit the "quote" button to see how it looked when I tried to reply to it, and in that box it was fine. Then I hit my browser back button, and it was all fixed. Super weird!

IBJoel

No, but sometimes all the stuff we have on our site can get screwy. Our last PHP update in 2020 devastated our apostrophes in the reviews side. I'm not a tech person, but I'm assuming there could be odd interactions with code and blockers Adam Tyner would have way better guesses than I would.

Adam Tyner

I’ll see what I can figure out, but it might be a couple days before I can really dig into it.

My guess is that it’s a client-side character set mismatch, choking on the curled apostrophes that mobile browsers (and people copying/pasting from MS Word) like to use.

TheBang

No

Right, because both of those action did a new page load. As I've mentioned a few times in this thread, this issue seems to be confined to content loaded by the "Infinite Scroll" auto-loader.

Just, as a basic tenet of troubleshooting, have your tech guys tried to reproduce the problem themselves? It's fairly simple to do. I did it again today (to get some additional info) on a brand-new computer that had never visited DVD Talk before, and it only took about 2 minutes to reproduce the issue. Most of that time was spent trying to find the Zack Snyder Justice League review thread that we've been using to illustrate. That way they can ask themselves if they've blocked ads or accepted cookies.

I've confirmed the problem now on Chrome, Brave, Edge, Firefox, Safari, iPadOS, macOS, and Windows. The only new piece of information from my testing today is that Firefox manifests in the same way as Safari, that is, silently, by simply not rendering anything where the curly quote/apostrophe should be. Chrome-based browsers seem to always have a space or box or X or question-mark diamond.

IBJoel

Both myself and tech attempted to reproduce, yes. Although not with infinite scroll, which I'll try now.

ETA: Attempted with IS enabled. Still unable to reproduce.

TheBang

Here you go, try this:

https://imgur.com/a/lV8HC00

You can literally see at the 0:16 second mark, at the exact moment that it changes the page count to page 26 and the auto-loader re-reads the thread title, the apostrophe in the browser title bar changes into a question-mark diamond.

Remember, it needs to be curly quotes or apostrophes (regular ones are not affected), and to see curly quotes affected, it has to be on a page that has been auto-loaded by IS. Content that was not auto-loaded by IS (for example, when you click on a specific page number or "Next" page or first enter a thread) is not affected.