non-English characters - do I just need to try harder?

April 25, 2002 11:59 AM

I was gonna post a link in MeFi and wanted to have my post contain a few chinese characters. . .believe me this would have been a laugh riot. I pasted in some Chinese and they came out as question marks on the preview so I decided that it would not have been THAT funny after all.

Is there something intrinsic in the MeFi servers that prevent non-English characters, or do I just need to try harder?
posted by Danf to Feature Requests at 11:59 AM (11 comments total)

Probably a high-ascii encoding issue with the database, no to mention the problems with display on any number of browsers/OS combinations. I doubt they would make sense to very many members, what was the point of adding them?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:04 PM on April 25, 2002

There was an article about the Chinese government planning to attack US computer systems on a systematic basis. . LA Times link. I was gonna try to be cute about it. . .no biggie, was just curious.

BTW, aren't you Matt Haughley?. . .no?. .. you must get that a lot.
posted by Danf at 12:09 PM on April 25, 2002

If it's that big a deal, you could take a screenshot and post it inside as an image. I wouldn't post an image to the front page, though.
posted by jpoulos at 12:24 PM on April 25, 2002

HE has communed with you Danf. May you and your family be blessed for all eternity.
posted by crasspastor at 12:35 PM on April 25, 2002

Servers? Actually, only 45 of Mefi's 103 servers can display Chinese characters.
posted by ParisParamus at 12:46 PM on April 25, 2002

But an upgrade of the others is expected soon.
posted by ParisParamus at 12:46 PM on April 25, 2002

Even if mefi sends the ascii codes out, unless you have that character set already installed you won't see anything but ascii codes.
posted by skallas at 2:29 PM on April 25, 2002

Lots of boxes and other fun stuff.
posted by skallas at 2:30 PM on April 25, 2002

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posted by rocketman at 2:40 PM on April 25, 2002

you could use images couldn't you?
posted by corpse at 2:49 PM on April 25, 2002

Just curious matt, I know you use SQL Server, are comments stored as TEXT,NTEXT,VARCHAR or NVARCHAR?

posted by patrickje at 3:05 PM on April 25, 2002