Update on wikis and subdomains

Mr. Teatime · Post by **Mr. Teatime** » Wed Apr 13, 2005 10:53 pm

[Community -> Update] - News related to <a href="http://www.duckandcover.cx/archives.php?topstory=8">Top Story: Wikipocalypse Launch</a> | More info on <a href="http://wikipocalypse.duckandcover.cx/in ... title=Duck and Cover">Community: Duck and Cover</a> | More info on <a href="http://wikipocalypse.duckandcover.cx/in ... >Community: Wikipocalypse</a> | More info on <a href="http://wikipocalypse.duckandcover.cx/in ... tle=Sierra Army Depot">Community: Sierra Army Depot</a>

Just so you all know, the wikis are coming back, as are the
subdomains (sorry Sierra Army Depot :( ). We've had a bunch of problems
with installing databases which the wikis and subdomains use. DarkUnderlord (and Mutant) can explain this in more detail than I can, but it's being worked on and we're trying to work something out.Also
on an unrelated note, is anyone here good with HTML? We have a few very
good site designs done but I'm not confident enough in HTML to code
them. If you're a decent webdesigner, let me know...

Fez · Post by **Fez** » Wed Apr 13, 2005 11:53 pm

You should give it a go, that's how you learn.

I don't know shit about these kind of things until I try for something, and then I usually manage it once I have the hang of it.

Good to hear some progress on this.

Raymondo · Post by **Raymondo** » Thu Apr 14, 2005 1:30 am

I'm alright with HTML.

....Yeah, about that design thing. Sorry, my hard drive crashed and I lost everything. Major grrness. I could make another one if you want?

Post by **DarkUnderlord** » Thu Apr 14, 2005 2:45 am

Specifically, if anyone knows how I can convert this:
Prima Aprilis : PowrÃƒÆ’Ã‚Â³t Van Burena - Fallout 4 ogÃƒâ€šÃ‚Â³oszony!

... back into it's Polish equivalent, it'd be much appreciated. Those 'ÃƒÆ’Ã‚Â³' are not Polish characters.

There are more fun examples in the Sierra Army Depot forum.

Fez · Post by **Fez** » Thu Apr 14, 2005 3:12 am

It did the same with my sig. It changed the punctuation marks into odd symbols. Looks like editing it back by hand would be the solution. Or scanning through for all combinations of odd characters and converting them back in one lot to the corresponding character they should be.

Brother None · Post by **Brother None** » Thu Apr 14, 2005 12:33 pm

DarkUnderlord wrote:Specifically, if anyone knows how I can convert this:
Prima Aprilis : PowrÃƒÆ’Ã‚Â³t Van Burena - Fallout 4 ogÃƒâ€šÃ‚Â³oszony!

... back into it's Polish equivalent, it'd be much appreciated. Those 'ÃƒÆ’Ã‚Â³' are not Polish characters.

That's impossible, as far as I know. Remember when you used to work on note-pad and it would convert your enters into those little squares? There was no way to automatically convert them all back into what they originally were as Notepad has no idea what the hell they used to be. Same here, there's no automatic conversion program that can figure out what those errors used to be.

Like Fez said, tt would be an option to manually figure out what it converted from. Presumable, every 'ÃƒÆ’Ã‚Â³' stems from the same Polish character, and search and replace would fix it, but would take a long time. Wouldn't recommend using it except for the bigger things.

When did it do this? During the server move? Guess it was a database conversion error, then...I assume you're using identical stylesheets on both servers, I've seen this happen once on a badly-defined font-stylesheet (e.g. font='font that doesn't support Polish keyboard' without an alternative font like Times defined for whenever Polish (or Russian or Finnish or Arabic) is requested). EDIT: I guess it's database conversion problems, since that's also the snag in moving the wikis. That really can't be helped, though it's somewhat unusual, databases tend to be pretty easy to move, which is one of their big advantages.

I'm pretty good at XHTML, which helps RSS feeds, not to mention that it's the wave of the future (yeah, baby! br /, not just br!), but I doubt I'll have time to fully code websites. I could go over them and debug them, as well as fix the XHTML (I'm serious, it's growing more and more necessary to use XHTML rather than HTML. Mozilla browsers particularly are cracking down on XHTML errors), heh, if my help's accepted.

ApTyp · Post by **ApTyp** » Thu Apr 14, 2005 2:29 pm

Write a Perl script. You'd probably have to open the exported text in binary mode to prevent any text conversion error. Just replace all "weird" characters to whatever charset it was written in originally.

I don't think that what you have right now is just a single placeholder character all over the place. Look at Fez' signature - he has two different combinations. Perhaps you can still recover...

UPDATE:
I tried viewing the page in Unicode UTF-8, and it seems to have worked out the weird character issue.

Post by **DarkUnderlord** » Thu Apr 14, 2005 2:38 pm

Kharn wrote:When did it do this? During the server move?

Yup. Sitting in the database the data was fine. I made a dump (several at the time actually, all testing out various different commands) and when I downloaded and opened it, the data was all like that. Somehow, in the database the data was fine, exporting it messed it up in some way. I don't know enough about database / server setups to know quite how but quite possibly, as you say, an erroneous config setting and everything goes to crap.

Kharn wrote:I'm pretty good at XHTML

Fuck I hate XHTML.

Originally "DAC Classic" was going to be completely XHTML. With the number of errors I ran into on old, new and other browsers it was easier to simply table it all and be done with it.

ApTyp wrote:Write a Perl script. You'd probably have to open the exported text in binary mode to prevent any text conversion error. Just replace all "weird" characters to whatever charset it was written in originally.

There've been a few charset conversion thigns I've tried. Mainly the charset within MySQL 4.1.11 itself which allows you to change the charset on a table. Changing the setting, exporting, importing again and a range of other variations there-of failed to actually convert the data except... I did find it messed it up more. Each time I tried, it seemed to think the 'A3' was two characters and so ended up producing more and more characters until "ogÃƒâ€šÃ‚Â³oszony!" became "ogÃƒâ€šÃ‚Â³Ãƒâ€šÃ‚Â³Ãƒâ€šÃ‚Â³Ãƒâ€šÃ‚Â³Ãƒâ€šÃ‚Â³Ãƒâ€šÃ‚Â³Ãƒâ€šÃ‚Â³oszony!".

If a manual conversion is the only way to do it, we'd have to make a list of every character that's messed up and what it's equivalent is. It seems that in some cases, one character has been replaced with two (which makes me wonder if some stuff was stored in a 2 byte charset and the server PC didn't understand it).

ApTyp · Post by **ApTyp** » Thu Apr 14, 2005 2:47 pm

This is exactly why they invented Unicode.
Although it seems that UTF-8 doesn't work 100% with the text on SAD forums. I'm afraid that the conversion may've fucked up the text.

Brother None · Post by **Brother None** » Thu Apr 14, 2005 2:57 pm

DarkUnderlord wrote:Yup. Sitting in the database the data was fine. I made a dump (several at the time actually, all testing out various different commands) and when I downloaded and opened it, the data was all like that. Somehow, in the database the data was fine, exporting it messed it up in some way. I don't know enough about database / server setups to know quite how but quite possibly, as you say, an erroneous config setting and everything goes to crap.

Normally I would say contact your old server. Without detailed knowledge of the workings and quirks of their database servers, it'd be impossible to figure out what went wrong. But considering JJTek was little more than a cover for an actual hosting server, I severely doubt they have a clue (or that they'd be willing to help), so grabbing the problem at the source is not much of an option

Kharn wrote:Fuck I hate XHTML. Originally "DAC Classic" was going to be completely XHTML. With the number of errors I ran into on old, new and other browsers it was easier to simply table it all and be done with it.

You won't find too many objections with me there. I used to call XHTML "the nazi's version of HTML". Some of it is just way too much, especially the values-'' rule, which just drives me nuts.

However new browsers are pretty strict on this, as are search engines like Google. More and more agreements are being made about this and Mozilla just pushes it further and further. I wasn't kidding about the wave of the future thing, it's very worthwhile to have your site in proper XHTML by now.

ApTyp wrote:There've been a few charset conversion thigns I've tried. Mainly the charset within MySQL 4.1.11 itself which allows you to change the charset on a table. Changing the setting, exporting, importing again and a range of other variations there-of failed to actually convert the data except... I did find it messed it up more. Each time I tried, it seemed to think the 'A3' was two characters and so ended up producing more and more characters until "ogÃƒâ€šÃ‚Â³oszony!" became "ogÃƒâ€šÃ‚Â³Ãƒâ€šÃ‚Â³Ãƒâ€šÃ‚Â³Ãƒâ€šÃ‚Â³Ãƒâ€šÃ‚Â³Ãƒâ€šÃ‚Â³Ãƒâ€šÃ‚Â³oszony!".

If a manual conversion is the only way to do it, we'd have to make a list of every character that's messed up and what it's equivalent is. It seems that in some cases, one character has been replaced with two (which makes me wonder if some stuff was stored in a 2 byte charset and the server PC didn't understand it).

If that's the case the people of sorcerers.net (your host now, right? Tell them to update their hosted site list) might be able to help, though I doubt they'll be willing to reconfigure their database to adapt it to this. The question would be why in Frith's name JJTek's database would use a 2 byte charset. Sorry, but that's just unnecessary

PS: another thought, won't this fuck up some people's usernames and/or passwords? You might want to check with some of your Polish posters. Slamak's name appears fuxxored, for instance.

Fez · Post by **Fez** » Thu Apr 14, 2005 6:30 pm

The Internet hates Polish, it seems.

Ashmo · Post by **Ashmo** » Fri Apr 15, 2005 8:12 am

If I had the time, I'd lay a hand on your code.

I code in valid XHTML 1.1, but am also able to dumb it down into XHTML 1.0 S/T/F or HTML 4.01 S/T/F. XHTML is good coding practice but unless you are going to apply a server side browser switch or ignore 90% of your visitors, true XHTML is not practicable (which is why I use a switch on my side and a script that dumbs my XHTML down into HTML 4.01 Strict for non-compliant browsers like MSIE).

HTML is more forgiving, but that also explains why ninety percent of the "I CAN PROGRAM HTML LOLZ!!!111" crowd has no bloody idea what they are doing and use tags for formatting and CSS only for coloring links (or MS-CSS for coloring the scrollbar).

Unless you want to go the way of the dodo by sticking to voodoo coding, standards are the way to go.

Megatron · Post by **Megatron** » Fri Apr 15, 2005 6:00 pm

[url=http://////.com]

kis are coming back, as are the subdomains (sorry Sierra Army Depot ). We've had a bun

[/url]

what about the wasteland

Mr. Teatime · Post by **Mr. Teatime** » Fri Apr 15, 2005 6:58 pm

Well a bunch of them are back up (including VotF, Slamak!!!!!!).

DJ SlamÃƒÂ¡k · Post by **DJ SlamÃƒÂ¡k** » Fri Apr 15, 2005 7:45 pm

Omg are the subdomains up yet?

Post by **DarkUnderlord** » Tue Apr 19, 2005 6:28 am

The Wikipocalypse is back in now. The Vault and others still need to be setup, waiting on some config stuff to be done by Taluntain first and then they should be up not long after.

PnP is up... though the only version seems to be Polish? MvMapHub is also back, though I notice one or two links within that are a bit borked. Most of it works though.

SAD will require a bit of work before it's back online though.

Once they're all working, I'll make a new news post. Eventually I'll put the ads in and fix up the themes too (this goes for the gallery as well).