As all of you have noticed, all diacritical marks in German, French etc. and numerous English punctuation marks are now rendered in the "upgrade" as �. This makes many of our past posts, especially the French-English dictionary incomprehensible.
Dave allowed me to repost the dictionary and it works as a repost with the accents, etc.now...but we can't go back and redo all those historical posts. They cannot be understood...and certainly some of the English for our non-English speakers will be gibberish. Dave is working on this. Computer upgrades are always good...right?
The problem persists and infects all sort of punctuation marks on historical posts....but in particular diacritical marks on foreign languages. How can you transform a - (dash) or a " (quotation mark) or an ' (apostrophe) to a �? It appears everywhere, even in English topic posts. It renders past foreign language posts incomprehensible. If I were Dave, and a company did this to my site, I'd be pretty upset.
Fact #1: Upgrades for cell phones and computer systems, in most cases, make the company money, or they would not insist on your doing it
Fact #2: We usually become accepting of the upgrade after awhile, regardless how aggravating it is (and they know it)
Fact #3: The older we are the less accepting we are of change, because we have learned these changes will likely not improve our way of life
Fact #4: As long as we suck at the tit of these parent companies, to fill our bellies with convenience and gratification, we will have to put up with upgrades
Likely scenario: Dave had a valid need for the upgrade or he would not have gone to the trouble to shut the site down and do it. I suspect it will all be worked out eventually. I hope so, for the sake of those who have worked so hard storing data and information here but, there is a ....
....... lesson to learn: Back up anything that may be of value to you, and if it is a labor of love don't get jacked up if it gets screwed up or lost. Think about all that beforehand. It's free, unless you are of a mind to recompense the host for some of his expense and trouble (the vast majority are not), and
.........remember what you learned as a youngster, and the confirmation of that lesson from photobucket, about free stuff.
Just spent an hour correcting dashes, apostrophes, quotation marks and various French diacritical marks on an historical post which has over 1 million visitors.
But still, the upgrade contractors should be held to account. How can you not transfer a simple English language "apostrophe" from an old site to a new one?