MetaTalk

Happy weekend, fam! For this week's Metatalktails, shockingly, you are not the main character. Instead, you are the sidekick. You are the loyal Watson to someone else's Holmes, the devoted Samwise to someone's Frodo, the bemused Sancho to someone's Quixote ... [more inside]
posted by taz on Oct 8, 2022 - 37 comments

Can we talk about extending the character limit for fpp titles beyond 72 characters? [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome on Jul 7, 2015 - 65 comments

Has the maximum length for comments been shortened some time in the past six months or so? I see more and more comments getting cut off that seem long-ish but hardly Treaty-of-Westphalia long. Perhaps there was a discussion about this and I missed it. I hate to request ponies, but perhaps a "characters remaining" count for the text-entry field or a warning on hitting Post would help alleviate the problem.
posted by adamrice on Dec 10, 2011 - 62 comments

Ask.meta pony - how about tracking followups from the OP in "new answers"? [more inside]
posted by Mutant on Dec 22, 2009 - 16 comments

or the nth time just now, I used the 'less than' symbol to mean 'less than', not as the start of some HTML. The preview shows < as < but in the posted comment, it is treated as HTML and just screws up the post. Preview here also shows < as < The < in this post so far have been entered as & l t ; but here is a sample: 15 days <18 days and using the dread symbol itself 15 days <18 days Let's see what we get. I just noticed that on the preview page here, all the & l t ; in the Description: box were changed to <
posted by hexatron on Apr 19, 2008 - 48 comments

My iBook displays the first character of this post as a box. I recently used DeLocalizer -- did I delete something important?
posted by popcassady on Jun 24, 2007 - 7 comments

When users make FPPs with curly quotes, they are not properly encoded in the RSS feed. Instead of their respective entities (“, ”), they are replaced with question marks. This is in the RSS feed, not an error on the part of my RSS readers (NetVibes, NewsGator, and NetNewsWire for the record). Is this intended behavior, or a bug?
posted by charmston on Mar 23, 2006 - 12 comments

The page for the français tag (which uses a ç) doesn't work right. In particular, it doesn't list the post that uses it.
posted by smackfu on Mar 1, 2006 - 7 comments

What character should I play on MeFi?
posted by five fresh fish on Dec 10, 2005 - 149 comments

Thank you for the post double-question-mark.

peacay is referring to '김치' but only sees '??'. There are a lot of people not getting the proper encoding, what's the best way to update, through the browser?
posted by The Jesse Helms on Aug 17, 2005 - 33 comments

well, now this is certanly ??.
posted by delmoi on Jul 13, 2005 - 80 comments

IE for Mac occasionally mangles posts with quotation marks, apostrophes, etc. For example: “Y’all must stay non-nuclear, but we’ll have as many nukes as we want. We’ll make new nukes but keep the old. And if you don’t like it, just take a good look at Iraq, because you could be next.�
posted by Miss Bitchy Pants on Jan 6, 2005 - 24 comments

A boring, very minor quibble with a view to absolute perfection: accent xenophobia continues to run rampant in MetaFilter's and MetaTalk's posting boxes. [More inside.]
posted by MiguelCardoso on Jan 28, 2004 - 43 comments

The other day I posted a sentence including the Greek letter pi. This appeared as the Greek letter on preview but came out as a couple of question marks in the actual post. Today a post by languagehat included some Kanji characters and a bit later in the thread he says, darn it, ...those characters looked fine on preview. Can someone explain the difference between preview and live posting when it comes to special characters? Thanks!
posted by jfuller on Nov 25, 2003 - 25 comments

As can be seen in the title link in this post, certain characters in front page posts, like apostrophes, mess up the RSS feed. Is there some way to prevent them from being used or automatically switching them to encoded character entities?
posted by nyukid on Oct 2, 2003 - 10 comments

I was trying to put less-than and more-than symbols in a post and used the "& # 62/60;" format. It worked in preview, but in actualité, it left a big blank space where the enclosed [witty] comment was supposed to appear.
What's the situation with character entity references here on MeFi? [The FAQ was silent on this, so I ask.]
posted by Blue Stone on Sep 21, 2003 - 14 comments

If you thought I was going to be a typical neophyte/scumbag and ask "What's with the boxes?" then you're sadly mistaken, my friends. I know full-well it's old hat, and that's why you won't hear a peep out of me.
posted by Ljubljana on Sep 30, 2002 - 24 comments

I think I'll press the 'XML' button and see what happens ... what does 'An invalid character was found in text content. Error processing resource 'http://xml.metafilter.com/rss.xml'. Line 14, Position 152' mean?
posted by feelinglistless on May 13, 2002 - 39 comments

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 on Apr 25, 2002 - 9 comments

Collectively, the Weblog Community has been ga-ga over sites that claim to analyze your personality (the generic personality types, what kind of dog are you, your celebirty mate, sci-fi character types, etc., you know the links).
Well, now it's become popular to use the Dictator/Sitcom Character Guesser in the same manner, by answering all the questions as yourself.
Early results: Ev is Lou Grant, Jason K. is Jack from Threes Company, Brig is Gary Hobson from Early Edition (WHO? The guy who gets tomorrow's newspaper and tries to change it), Bumper Bob is Frohike from X-Files, Jezzicuh is Willow from Buffy, there's even a 'blogger who's one of the Powerpuff Girls.
Who am I? Er... uh, well... On first try, I came up as Hans Moleman from The Simpsons, but after changing my answer to "are you losing hair" to "no" (it was lost years ago), after 43 questions I came out as that wacky neighbor Wilson on Home Improvement.
SO WHO THE HECK ARE YOU?
posted by wendell on Mar 5, 2000 - 23 comments