Topic: Cleaning up special characters on VGMaps ("©", letters with accents, etc.)

[JonLeung]

Hi everyone, sorry that it took me a while to get to this.

At some point earlier this year, I'm not sure what happened, but the HTML pages were being interpreted differently.  It's probably on the server side of things, because regardless of device or browser, "©" started appearing as "�".  This was a result of me using "©" itself directly in the HTML code, which, you'd think would be as simple as can be, but apparently not.  So I had to change it to the universally-understood "©" in the code - which if you ask me, is not at all intuitive.  And I don't get why it would suddenly appear as the "�" way despite being fine for 16 years...

I changed the "©" on a few popular pages and as I updated them, but today I finally got around to thoroughly fixing the "©" on every main atlas page.  I also fixed "Pokémon", "Alien³", "720°", Solstice's "Kâstleröck", and the Carmen Sandiego game developer, "Brøderbund".  If you reload the pages they should appear correctly now.

However, I'm pretty sure there are likely other special characters lurking about, and I may have missed them, so if you see some nonsensical or garbled text (not ZZT's "Castle Of *@#%&!!", but I mean something definitely wrong) in place of something, or any other errors, let me know and I'll fix it.  Thanks!

EDIT: Also, now that Project Wonderful's service ended (they managed the auction-based ads) I have purged the code from the pages that had it.  I don't know if people had some pages hang up because of that, but if so, it's one less thing to be concerned about.

[Grizzly]

This sequence, �, is the used as the Unicode Replacement Character (�), typically displayed as a question mark in browsers for characters they don't understand or don't have a font for. And then converted back to ANSI, which results in these three characters.
So there must have been a server side change which introduced an extra processing step. Normally it's no problem to use these standard special characters directly in HTML (except when the website is then viewed with one of the old foreign text encodings instead of Unicode).

[JonLeung]

I found a bunch more errors (including different apostrophes and hyphens and ellipses), so I did a lot of cleanup this morning.  Hopefully I've taken care of all the "�"s now.