For the next release of IP.Board HTML entities must be fixed

[Stenis]

When you (IPS) start the development for the next release of IP.Board you just have to fix HTML entities so that international users can view the content of emails correct instead of seeing for instance & 1 3 9 ; instead of some Nordic characters. Many users are wondering/complaining why the contents of the emails look so strange. I think this is particularly important as you are looking to support IP.Board in a majority of the world languages.

[Matt]

It would be easier to invent a time machine and go back to 1999 and release IP.Board 1 as UTF-8 and make it impossible to change the character set.

[Stenis]

:) So you are saying that if I (somehow) convert my forum to UTF8 I will not see these problems?

[Matt]

I strongly advise against converting your forum to UTF-8. My flip remarks were mostly aimed at myself for introducing the confusion of character sets and the internet to my own life.

If you file a bug, we'll take a look but with the various encoding methods, types of storage, types of communication protocols, browsers, servers, PHP versions and characters, it's not an easy task to "fix" it for everyone.

[Stenis]

I already have communicated this via various bug reports for a long time, see for example http://community.invisionpower.com/tracker/issue-22750-unicode-characters-in-email-notification/ and the duplicate reports Brandon is referring to.

The main problem for me is that users get emails (replies to new posts, PM:s etc) containing text in Swedish where all Nordic characters are in unicode format making it pretty much unreadable.

[Axel Wers]

Generally I didn't have big issues with slovakian special characters ľščťžýáíéäúôň, but for sure I don't use special characters in email notifications.

[Stenis]

Ok Axel, maybe you're running with some other config then me then :)

The thing is that when someone write a PM or a forum post they do it in Swedish. When the notification email is sent, it contain the PM or the forum post content in the email and that part is what looks strange. I have translated all email templates to Swedish and they look OK. It's just the content that's basically screwed up :/

[bfarber]

The underlying problem is that characters are often stored as HTML-entities in the database, and without HTML emails these entities display as-is (i.e., as the entity code, rather than the character it represents). To resolve this, we will need to implement HTML emails in the future.

We have a FFFV bug report to do so.

[rastaX]

I like the time machine idea. I'll be happy to beta test it for you.