Oh for Pete's sake!

What did you guys do to your Forums in "Zones 2.0"!?

I'm a typography geek, among other things. Seeing inch-marks instead of true opening and closing quotes, or foot-marks instead of true apostrophes, or hyphens instead of true dashes, hurts my teeth. Being forced to type them is even more agonizing for me! I have quit Forums that force me to do this. Not to mention that when people have names in languages other than English that have accented vowels or some such, I expect to be able to both see and type them as they should be!

Yours used to allow this. Now, though, regardless of whether using HTML Named Entities (e.g. "—" for an Em Dash), HTML ANSI Numeric Entities (e.g. "—" for an Em Dash), HTML Decimal Unicode Numeric Entities (e.g. "—" for an Em Dash), HTML Hexadecimal Unicode Numeric Entities (e.g. "—" for an Em Dash), or directly typing in the ANSI character (e.g. holding down [Alt] while pressing and releasing the following keys, in this sequence, on the Numeric Keypad only!: [0 Ins]. [1 End], [5 ], and finally [1 End] again [thus the number "0151"], then releasing the [Alt] key, like this: "—", I no longer get an Em Dash!

If I type an Entity, I get the HTML of the Entity, ampersand and semicolon and all. If I type in a character directly, it looks like it converts it to garbage characters similar to what a user would see when attempting to display a Unicode Transform Format 8-bit (UTF-8) page on a Web browser that has its Encoding hard-set to ISO or ANSI (or if the page lacks a proper "charset" Meta tag), except you guys have actually hard-coded that garbage! When Viewing Source, I see HTML Decimal Entities for the garbage characters!

Then, if I Edit the page, the garbage characters themselves get replaced with more garbage characters, and the problem accumulates!

Here's what happened to the word "I'm" with a real apostrophe (single closing quote, aka right single quote, aka "’" directly typed in as an ANSI character, after only three edits (trying to fix it):

"I’m" -- it will likely be even worse in this post because it will convert the garbage into even more garbage!

Any of the numbers > 255 (e.g. "€" or even "š" are Unicode-only values. The others could be ASCII or ISO/ANSI.

Why!?!? You're a German company, fer cryin' out loud! You guys have to type umlauts and double-ess characters and such all the time! I can understand some myopic American company thinking that they can get away with forcing straight ANSI/ISO or (worse) ASCII on people in this day and age, but the world has moved on to Unicode years ago! You even do have the proper charset="utf-8" Meta tag at the top of these Forum pages!

Testing,▐ em dash? (Testing direct hexadecimal typing of Unicode in Windows)

More problems. To demonstrate this, I'm Editing my second post, instead of typing a new one.

Note that, for "Edited by:", it shows my name as merely a hyphen!?

And note that for when I edited, we get a purple smilicon (just like we got several orange winkicons and a yellow smilicon) in the time of editing!

Apparently it sees the "8" of "18" followed by a colon for hour:minute separation and thinks that that's a glasses-wearing smiley (the yellow smilicon in the previous post was similar, being "UTF-8" as the last statement in parentheses, so the "8" and "" combined to form a smiley!).

Yeesh! At least give us a way to turn smilicons off, or disable them entirely for a Forum such as this where we may need to type in source code or other computer text that may have any characters in any sequence!

Edited by - on 02 Feb 2009 23:26:06

Oh, this is rich. This is too much!

Read the "Forum Rules -- Read Before Posting" message in this Forum.

#1, it nicely demonstrates the Unicode problem I just described.

#2, rather than being what it says, namely, Rules for this Forum, it instead appears to be a private support Email that was supposed to be sent to some person instead of posted to this Forum as the friggin' Forum Rules!

Is DMXzone dying? If they make mistakes like this (not to mention the "Advanced" HTML Editor 2.0.9 fiasco, wherein they released an HTML editor that eats all the commas from articles it edits! And we've been unable to install the 2.0.10 "fix" to it, and have not had a working answer from them for over half a year!), something is badly wrong in the House of Petrov!

Hi Joel,

Thanks for reporting that - we will investigate and fix in the forums as well. Was an issue on the rest of the content where we already fixed it.

It's being a major CMS rewrite that we have done - so we appreciate the feedback so we can smooth things up!

Quote

Why!?!? You're a German company, fer cryin' out loud! You guys have to type umlauts and double-ess characters and such all the time! I can understand some myopic American company thinking that they can get away with forcing straight ANSI/ISO or (worse) ASCII on people in this day and age, but the world has moved on to Unicode years ago! You even do have the proper charset="utf-8" Meta tag at the top of these Forum pages!

WOW - now you insulted us ....We are HOLLAND company!!!! The biggest insult to a Dutch man is to call them germans ... old pain of war comes up ...

Not that I mind I'm frm origin Bulgarian but still

So keep posting other issues about the site/forums so we can fix them right away!

Greetings,
George

Look ma I can do Unicode:

Nice dash: —

Weird "german" characters: éöó

Weird Word quotes are ̀dfsdfsd̀́

Well it seems all fixed now

George

Quote

Hi Joel,

Thanks for reporting that - we will investigate and fix in the forums as well. Was an issue on the rest of the content where we already fixed it.

It's being a major CMS rewrite that we have done - so we appreciate the feedback so we can smooth things up!

Quote

Why!?!? You're a German company, fer cryin' out loud! You guys have to type umlauts and double-ess characters and such all the time! I can understand some myopic American company thinking that they can get away with forcing straight ANSI/ISO or (worse) ASCII on people in this day and age, but the world has moved on to Unicode years ago! You even do have the proper charset="utf-8" Meta tag at the top of these Forum pages!

WOW - now you insulted us ....We are HOLLAND company!!!! The biggest insult to a Dutch man is to call them germans ... old pain of war comes up ...

Not that I mind I'm frm origin Bulgarian but still

So keep posting other issues about the site/forums so we can fix them right away!

Greetings,
George

Yikes! My deepest apologies on the misattributed nationality thing!

Okay, other issues that have come to my attention since my original post (I had started another thread on this subject in “Bugs” here in this generic Forum, where I figured it more properly belonged, but since you Replied here, I will continue it here):

• Subscription Reply Notification Emails have no link (not even select/copy/pastable, let alone clickable) to the Forum. It simply has the name of the Subject and Forum, which can make it difficult to find the thread, especially if enough time has passed or activity ensued to cause the thread to scroll off the first page. Such an Email should also include at least the user name of the Replier, and the first part of the Reply text itself, so one can tell if a Reply is worth reading before having to go to the Forum.
• Icons for “Edit” (pencil on envelope) and “Delete” (white dash on red circle) appear at the right side of the header of every Forum post, regardless of whether or not it was posted by the actual logged-in user! For instance, I see those icons on your posts, George! I clicked the “Edit” icon on one of yours and it instead called up the preceeding post of mine, so apparently it won’t allow me to actually edit one of your posts (I didn’t dare try the “Delete” icon!). Still, though, this is certainly confusing, and risky as well!
• This one I just discovered while trying to write this post: when I went to click on the Bulleted List icon to create this very Bulleted List, I had first clicked below the then-last line of my post (the paragraph immediately above this bulleted list) and even pressed the [Enter] key a couple times to create blank lines to separate it. However, it placed the Bulleted List BBcode ({list}{*}{/*}{/list} ← replace {braces} with [square brackets] in these examples) inside the middle of the word “but” in that paragraph! I deleted that and tried it again several times, with the same results!

The paragraph looked like this after clicking the Bulleted List icon:

Okay, other issues that have come to my attention since my original post (I had started another thread on this subject in “Bugs” here in this generic Forum, where I figured it more properly belonged, bu{list}
{*}
{/*}
{/list}t since you Replied here, I will continue it here):

Edited to add: Yowtch! The Bulleted List thing doesn’t even work! The code is there just fine, but as you can see, each bulleted item appears as one big paragraph with no bullets nor even blank separator lines like default HTML Paragraphs have!

Here’s what I typed (again, replacing [square brackets] with {curly braces} to keep it from taking effect):
{list}
{*}Subscription Reply Notification Emails have no link (not even select/copy/pastable, let alone clickable) to the Forum. It simply has the name of the Subject and Forum, which can make it difficult to find the thread, especially if enough time has passed or activity ensued to cause the thread to scroll off the first page. Such an Email should also include at least the user name of the Replier, and the first part of the Reply text itself, so one can tell if a Reply is worth reading before having to go to the Forum.[/*]
{*}Icons for “Edit” (pencil on envelope) and “Delete” (white dash on red circle) appear at the right side of the header of every Forum post, regardless of whether or not it was posted by the actual logged-in user! For instance, I see those icons on your posts, George! I clicked the “Edit” icon on one of yours and it instead called up the preceeding post of mine, so apparently it won’t allow me to actually edit one of your posts (I didn’t dare try the “Delete” icon!). Still, though, this is certainly confusing, and risky as well!{/*}
{*}This one I just discovered while trying to write this post: when I went to click on the Bulleted List icon to create this very Bulleted List, I had first clicked below the then-last line of my post (the paragraph immediately above this bulleted list) and even pressed the [Enter] key a couple times to create blank lines to separate it. However, it placed the Bulleted List BBcode ({list}{*}{/*}{/list} ← replace {braces} with [square brackets] in these examples) inside the middle of the word “but” in that paragraph! I deleted that and tried it again several times, with the same results!{/*}
{/list}

Testing the Numbered (Ordered) List button:

1. A-one-a,
2. and-a-two-a,
3. and a-three-a!


Nope, that doesn’t work either.

Oh, when I actually clicked on the Numbered List while Editing this already-existing post, it again placed the code in the middle of the word “but”! What, is that the 4,096th character in this post or some such (no, I’m not going to manually count them!)‽

It looks like you need to go back to the drawing board on Forums 2.0, and put Forums 1.x back up for the duration.

And finally, since I have your attention, Mr. Petrov, where exactly do I go to post about major bugs affecting all of your non-free Extensions that we have from you (about a dozen!)? The bugs are in the installation routine you guys came up with to inhibit piracy, and so affect every paid Extension of yours!

We have four figures worth of US dollars (yeah, yeah, I know, I know, not worth all that much anymore, but they were when we bought them) invested in your products, and can’t use any of them now! They actually crash Dreamweaver itself, on launch, so I can’t even use Dreamweaver (CS3) without uninstalling your products! All of them (except the freebies)!

I would like to go into more detail on this. Where is the appropriate Forum for general problems with DMXzone Extensions overall? Obviously, posting the same post in a dozen Extension-specific Forums won’t do, and I can’t see a place in these generic Forums to do so (the Bugs Forum is for bugs relating to these Dynamic Zones Websites [as I said, this thread really should be there instead of here])!



Edited by - Joel Rea on 04 Feb 2009  19:24:41

Hi Joel,

will check out the list items bugs tomorrow.

About the extensions support :

* every extensions has its own product page and there is a big "support" button that leads to extension support forum.

You can also go to myDMXzone (www.dmxzone.com/myzone.asp)and see all the extensions you bought with direct links to download, support faqs and serials.

We also have completely redesigned myDMXzone (see the left top box in de sidebar) to be much more convenient for finding quickly support and other extension help.

We even have a movie just ready to show it all:
Watch it now

Let me know what you think about it.

Greetings,
George

Quote

Hi Joel,

will check out the list items bugs tomorrow.

Looks like they’re fixed. Good.

Quote

About the extensions support :

* every extensions has its own product page and there is a big "support" button that leads to extension support forum.

Please read what I posted. I know about the individual support pages for each Extension. My problem is not with a particular Extension. It’s with your new protection scheme / deferred installer routine that affects all of your commercial Extensions!

I’m not about to hunt down the Forums for each and every one of the full dozen Extensions we have from you, and post the details of an identical installation / upgrade problem into each of them, and subscribe to each of them.

You need a Forum for general Bugs that affect the deferred installation / upgrade / protection / validation scheme that you’ve applied to all of your purchasable Extensions!

We can’t use any of them right now. Thousands of U.S. dollars wasted, just on the purchase price alone, not counting the hundreds of hours I personally have put in (and my time is not cheap) trying to solve these, including posting on these Forums. We’re about to lose several clients as a result (one of them gave us a hard deadline of first thing this Monday morning [10AM central time will be too late!] to have their site fully completed and functional, which depends on several of your Extensions! If you solved the problem right now I doubt I could make that deadline at this point!). Our business itself is threatened. All because we trusted your company.

I can’t even launch Dreamweaver itself right now because of your Extensions, so our investment in my seat of the entire Adobe CS3 Design Suite is also wasted! (We have put off upgrading to CS4 precisely because of this!)

This problem has been ongoing for over a year, and I’ve already posted about it in several of your Extension-specific Forums, and have yet to get an answer that actually works.

Oh, and I just discovered another Forum problem: clicking on the “Delete Post” icon deletes the post immediately, without asking for any confirmation! This is a no-no!.

When I think of the time you guys must have wasted on this “improved” Website instead of solving problems with your products that are about to kill my business in a time of economic near-depression, let’s just say that neither I nor my boss is exactly happy with you.

Edited by - Joel Rea on 06 Feb 2009  22:24:51