[laurence62]

Weird characters on page 


I have comments working perfectly on this page

http://www.gromitconsulting.co.za/contactus.php

But on this page (different website)

http://www.bainsmtbtrails.co.za/7contactus.php

these characters  appear. I have no idea where they come from, but it seems to be something to do with the comments part

This is what the original section of the php looks like

<hr />
<?php $page_id = "1";
$reference = "Page One";
$path_to_comments_folder = "comments/";
define ('IN_COMMENTICS', 'true'); //no need to edit this line
require $path_to_comments_folder . "includes/commentics.php"; //no need to edit this line
?><br />
<br />



and this is what it looks like if I "View Source" in Firefox (increase of font size is mine)

<hr>
</p><h3><a id="comments" name="comments">Comments</a></h3>
<div style='margin-bottom: 10px;'></div>


Any idea where these characters come from.

This leads to another question. I would like to reload the Commentics and Database to see iof that would solve the issue. how do i backup/restore all the comments?

[Steven]

Hi,

With Firefox, if you go to Tools -> Page Info, you'll see that the encoding for bainsmtbtrails.co.za is "ISO-8859-1" (incorrect), whereas the encoding for gromitconsulting.co.za is "UTF-8" (correct).

If you view source for bainsmtbtrails.co.za, you'll see that you have two charset tags:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

You only need one charset tag, and it should be the UTF-8 one, so please remove the ISO one.

You also have two charset tags for gromitconsulting.co.za, however the UTF-8 one seems to have been chosen by the browser, which is good. But it's best to remove the ISO one from there too.

More importantly, on bainsmtbtrails.co.za, I was banned when testing the processing of a comment. In the admin panel, can you go to Manage -> Bans and see what the reason was. If the reason is 'incorrect referrer' please see this post.

If after correcting the charset tags, you still see the  characters, it may be because the template files of Commentics are not encoded properly. This was the case with earlier versions of Commentics. If you upgrade to the new version then this issue should disappear.

[laurence62]

Thanks so much Steven. So one learns!

[laurence62]

Thanks so much Steven. So one learns!

Steven - thank you very much for a very potent Comments Script. I have managed to get websites working with the minimum of experience, which leads me to think that perhaps you should put this information (UTF vs ISO encoding, Admin priviledges) in a FAQ/Troubleshooting section. I have googled the UTF-8/ISO story, but it gets too technical for my brain.

Thanks once again
Laurence