The Riddle of the Question Marks

[Dr. Bantham]

It appears that many posts have been fouled by quotation marks in place of some non-alphanumeric characters. The hyphen, apostrophe and quotation mark appear to be the most prominent of the offended characters. Though I did not notice this for some time, I am certain it was the direct result of migrating the site to a new server. This necessitated a reconstruction of the files and restoration of the database, the latter being a process which utilized a text backup file. I hope that I am able to correct the matter by selectively restoring the affected posts, though it may be some time before I manage to research the matter properly. For now, you may notice these puzzling marks now and again throughout older post content. It will be of the highest priority to resolve this matter, though the nature of the issue is not such that time is of the essence.

[G. S. Carnivals]

I've only noticed one of my own posts to be infected by question marks. Oddly, it's the only post of mine that I've composed on a different computer (my work computer). I wrote the post, copied it to disk, brought the disk home, copied & pasted, etc. Perhaps the affected posts have a similar history?

Dr. Bantham: No need to worry on your part about the Quotation Forum. Question marks will only be allowed in proper context. Period. :!:

[Dr. Bantham]

Quote Originally Posted by G. S. Carnivals";p=&quot

Perhaps the affected posts have a similar history?

The lack of a defining classification of affected posts is half the reason why I have not attacked the repair. The shotgun pattern is disconcerting, though a proper examination of brain splatter will likely tell the tale.

[Dr. Bantham]

I now believe that these curious character anomalies are not the result of the aforementioned server migration, but instead a side-effect of the code upgrades that followed. Since these were security upgrades, I am not going to roll back the code. Instead, I will await a code patch and hope that the issue is resolved without the necessity for editing posts.

[Dr. Bantham]

Eureka! I have unravelled the mysterious riddle of the bewildering question marks. I am currently testing a correction method on select posts prior to eliminating the problem en masse via a script program.

[Dr. Bantham]

I believe this problem to have been remedied in all posts. The Repository is not responding to the same correction method, however. I will address the tainted entries therein very soon, even if I must resort to manual editing.