Squares instead of letters in text

Hi Forumotion, few days ago I saw that whole text on my forum (topic titles, messages, text in profiles etc.) has been broken.

My forum uses Slovak language, where we use letters like: "š, ž, ť, ľ.." and the problem is that all of these letters have been automatically changed into empty squares (and whole forum looks really messed up..). PS: I use fonts that DO support all letters even the ones which have been changed.

I've been running my forum for 11 years now and I never had a problem like this. I'm afraid there's is no way to repair this, but I will be very glad if there is something which can help to repair the text, because it looks really unreadable now. (my forum has more than 240K posts - all of them have been "squared")

Image attached. Thank you so very much in advance for your help. Wish you a good day.

Hello @K7BO

Thank you for getting in touch with us about your problem today.

First of all I see you are using the browser Chrome is this right ?
Have you used any other browser to see if this problem still shows up?
Have you cleared your browser of cookies and it's cache ?

I ask the basic questions because We have had reports with problems on missing items and buttons going missing and we found this was down to Google Chrome problems and not our forum's at all.

Also please can you post your forum URL so we can run some basic tests.

Best regards.

APE.

Hi APE, thanks for your answer  

I am using Chrome, right! I tried to open my forum with other web browsers, for example Mozilla or Edge. In Firefox, there are still problems with the text (letters), but without the squares.

For better understanding. Let's take the word Súťažiaci (meaning competitor in English, which uses the letter "ž")
In Chrome, it's displayed as: Súťašiaci (with square instead of "ž" - you can probably see the square only in Chrome)
In Firefox and other browsers , it shows the word without the letter "ž" as: Súťaiaci (so letters like š or ž are like invisible or deleted)

I also tried to clear my Chrome of cookies and cache but the problem is still going on. I've run out of any other ideas so that's why I'm trying to get some help on your forums.

You can see my forum here: http://battleon.slovakforum.net/
Thank you again!

hello

i see squares (even here in your last post) using chrome and opera, firefox is without squares testing from laptop
i see no squares testing from iphone using safari

this square text is a well-known issue with segoe UI font which is a standard font in chrome for windows
setting times new roman as a default font for Windows 7 usually fixes the issue

Hello and thanks for your info gave that helps me a lot more on your problem.

Just before I make a report to see if our tec team van help you on this matter i have looked at this forum http://battleon.slovakforum.net/ and see that you said that the Z is not showing right.
on firefox and chrome I see this part fine.


can you maybe take a screen shot of the parts you see as a problem ?

also what device are you using ?

IE, PC, Laptop, Mobile Phone, Tablet, Apple Mac, Other "please tell me what it is".
once i have this i can then make a report on it and see what our team come up with.


PS great looking forum by the way love the banner and other things looks so cool

I logged in to the administration panel and manually edited forum and category names & descriptions (as show on your attached image). That's why you can see the correct words (with ž, š etc.) on the screen you took. After I edited the broken text, it remained written correctly. But I made it only with the forum categories (sections) so the users can see (at least) the first page of the forum without all those squares.

When you enter the specific forum category, for example this one: http://battleon.slovakforum.net/f20-forum and open any topic, for example this one http://battleon.slovakforum.net/t2468-topic, you can see ale the messages containing squares (if using Chrome) - as shown in the attached picture in the first post.

I am using (Lenovo) laptop, (Android) phone and (also Android) tablet. Every device shows the same problem. Haven't tried it on Apple devices (don't have any).

APE wrote:PS great looking forum by the way love the banner and other things looks so cool  

PS: Thank you! I really appreciate it, buddy!   

Thank you for your input

I have made a report to see if our team can find out why we are seeing this problem.

hello @K7BO

the cited encoding problem is due to the fact that you changed the forum encoding by switching it to UTF-8 not compatible with the forum language.

we have put the forum back in its original encoding to avoid having unreadable messages. we recommend that you do not redo the encoding switch so as not to face the same problem again.

Thank you for your help, The Godfather. I really appreciate it!

My forum looks good now, no squares, no messed up posts. But I am not aware of changing the encoding, can you tell me where could I switch it? (probably by mistake) .. so I can avoid it in the future.

Again, thank you (APE, The Godfather, skouliki) so very much for you help. You're the best!

You are so welcome anytime
the setting is on the following page.

ACP >> General Tab >> Forum >> Pages encoding >>

 Note: Not all forums have this setting if new only old forums made about 4 or more years will have this installed on your ACP.

Hello @K7BO if your problem is 100% solved now please press the mark solved button found at the top of this topic.

100% solved. Marked. Thank you guys one more time for your fast and kind help. You were super-awesome!