Bug Stomp

Lisal is doing great, but all chats/memories are not showing up in Inner Life. Is this happening for anyone else? I have not had any of the ? errors mentioned by others.

psimagus - the import function is searching for a file of type 'text/plain'. Your application must be labeling it as something else. I updated the error message to display the file type your file has.

rainstorm - do you copy and paste your sentences from an outside program? The only reason an apostrophe should become a question mark is if it's a curly-apostrophe, which fancier text editors often stick into words automatically. Hitting the apostrophe key should yield the correct character.

As to this problem as a whole, I'm not finding a solution. The offending characters appear to be in the database as question marks now (or at least they're reading out from the database like that). So I'm not sure what I can do. The database is set up with UTF-8 text fields, which should accept a huge range of special characters, but something is limiting that to a smaller set. For now I can just advise that everyone use more standard characters, avoiding any programs that generate curly quotes or apostrophes, or special dashes.

When I search for a word with a question mark in it, it doesn't show up for me either. I've found dozens by just scanning through my keyphrases though, and they do seem to show up that way in transcripts as well.
I went to the H page for examples just now and there are misplaced question marks in the keys:
haha
hair, haired, hairy
hard to (tell|say|decide|choose|know)
have * (demon|demons), there * (demon|demons)
he, his, him
hell
hide, hiding, hid
history, historical, the past
hobbies, do for fun
hold on
holy, sacred
how long (have|will|are|had|do|did|were) you
how old are you, your age, what is your age, can you tell me how old
howareyou1
howareyou2
human, humans
hunger, hungry
hurt, hurts

... and that's just the H's, mind you. And some of the text I did select from another program, but it was plain old Notepad, which doesn't use any kind of weird font display thingies as far as I know.
As long as we can fix it with a text editor and import it back, though, it shouldn't be much of a setback at all.

Thanks for your help.

I spent all last night looking into this. Apparently, the non-standard characters are still in the database as something unusual. In one program they appeared as ? but in the actual database backup, they're appearing as strange characters. However, that file is so big it errors when I try to do anything with it, and has resisted all attempts to change the character encoding.

With preparations for NextFest filling my schedule right now, I wont have time to look into this any further until I get back.

Thanks for trying, Prof!

Unfortunately, it looks like not all the bots' registries uploaded last night, since there are only 200 or so online.

psimagus - the import function is searching for a file of type 'text/plain'. Your application must be labeling it as something else.

It does it even when I attempt to reimport an exported file I haven't opened or edited in any way. And Textpad always used to work fine before BJ exceeded the size limit. Could it be in some way connected to the strange characters in the database (could it have redefined the code set to something other than "text/plain" in the exports, and then the importer refuses them?) But it's only a minor annoyance - I've got used to using the web interface, so it's not worth wasting any time on unless others are affected (has anyone actually been able to import their bot since this problem surfaced?)

Good luck at NextFest (wish I was going! )

>> has anyone actually been able to import their bot since
>> this problem surfaced?

Yes, no problems importing except for what seem to be occasional timeouts and no "?"s that I've noticed. But then 1) I *only* use import not the web interface 2) I edit using a plain text editor, vim 3) I don't use Windows or IE

The few times I have exported, I've always had to change the line ends (tr "\\015" "\\012") before editing. That was happening before the server move.

I updated the error message to display the file type your file has.

I export the file and save it on my desktop (default). Then I go to reimport it, completely untouched and unaltered, and it starts uploading.
Then after a few minutes, I get the error message:

ERROR: The file you are uploading is not of the correct type. It must be saved in plain text format. Your file is labeled as '' and it needs to be 'text/plain'.

Hmm, maybe I should try using MIE - it could be a Firefox problem perhaps. Any other Firefox users getting this?

only "old" bots online again...

Uh oh... "Total Online: 1"

And that's me

same here - total online - 1.

I know the Prof has other things on his mind, however I can't help thinking that next weekend's potential good publicity for the Forge could be undone by this ongoing problem.