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In Progress Attempt to Repair Posts from Star Army's phpBB2 era

Wes

Wes

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🌸 FM of Yamatai
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Overview

This suggestion is for Star Army's staff (mainly Wes) to attempt to repair Star Army forum posts from Star Army's PHPBB2 forum, which were "damaged" in conversion to PHPBB3 as part of the great forum merge when we started to use Xenforo 1.

Background

During the software change, I not only converted the existing PHPBB3 forum but also I was able to successfully get PHPBB2 working and load the backups from 2004 to 05 or 07 (before the forum hack of 2007 and the start of the new forum which eventually became PHPBB3), then upgraded that forum to PHPBB3 and imported it into Xenforo 1, creating the unified forum we are using now. During the conversion process from PHPBB2 to PHPBB3, certain characters were not properly converted, which seem to be curly quotes and curly apostrophes. In some cases, they just appear as gibberish but in other cases the post is cut off below the point of the error, resulting in missing RP content. As you know, I try to preserve anyone's RP to the best reasonable extent so I would like to restore the content if possible. This is due to conversion from CP-1252 to Unicode UTF-8.

Example of a damaged post:

1712154175427.png

As you can see the errors look like:
  • " = Quote (curly) FIXED
  • ' = Single quote (curly) FIXED
  • ... = an ellipsis, I think FIXED
  • — = em-dash FIXED
  • Unquotes (curly) display as †and cut off the post in question.
  • ô = ô as in Santô Hei FIXED
See also: UTF-8 Character Debug Tool

1712162113468.png

Implementing the Suggestion

By searching for certain characters on Star Army pages on Google, I've been able to identify some of the affected posts. To implement the suggestion, we need to
  1. create a list of affected posts, edit the ones that just need editing
  2. I can batch edit the single quote errors at the database level probably
  3. the ones that are cut off I will need to search in an old copy of Star Army's database.
List of Affected Posts (Cut off):

  1. RP: 5th XF - [5th Expeditionary] Mission 00X-01: Master and Servant
  2. RP: 5th XF - [Finished]003-01 Rescue on Taiie IV (17th Armor Wing)
  3. RP: Pisces - Episode 01 - 'Under A Blind God'
  4. RP: NSS Kestrel - EPISODE 1, PART 1: Flight of the Falcon
  5. Rejected Submission - Lorath Tech: Powered Gloves
  6. NSS Cedar / NSS Canary
  7. Starship Wapon: Grey Goo
  8. [Carthage] Perry Class Heavy Expeditionary Cruiser
  9. RP: Ayenee - [Ayenee] Acquiring a Starship
  10. Lor System Information.
  11. RP: YSS Valiant - Mission 1
  12. RP: YSS Celia - [Anisa Star Fortress] Shattered Glass (3rd post, others need fixing)
  13. Gigatonne vs. Yottawatts
  14. Gluon Mesh / Yarvex discussion thread.
  15. RP: YSS Destiny - The 'Scrapers
  16. Approved Character - Aki'shma Tinker Occhesta
List of Affected Posts (Complete but need fixing)
  1. RP: YSS Celia - [YSS Celia, Ohara] Scenes Aboard a Ship
  2. SACN - [COMM] Attention Taisho Yui
  3. RP: YSS Celia - [YSS Celia] Poolside Conversation
  4. Waffle Iron
  5. Emrys Industries Fletchete Gauss Rifle
  6. RP: 5th XF - [Finished] First Officer's Tour and Welcome
  7. Rejected Character - Tom Alect
  8. Mantus Infantry Power Armour
  9. Emrys Industries Wet Wear
  10. Velcior Shuttle
  11. OOC - [OOC] Goban Discussion (I think it's complete?)
  12. Anti-matter Flechette Launcher
  13. Anthedon Power Armour
  14. Sperion Mini-Grenade
  15. Full conversion cyborg idea.
  16. Fight for Yamatai!
  17. Elysian Gender and Sexuality
There may be additional posts affected.

Voting

Voting sets the priority level of this suggestion in relation to other suggestions and projects.
 
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Upvote 4 Downvote
It's not proper Romanization, ō or ou are how that sound in Japanese is properly represented. Diacritical input on all platforms has greatly matured and become more accessible since that time. Why did you ever use ô, except it was easier to type in Windows XP with a US keyboard layout?
 
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Unknown, but after some research, it looks like ō is the way to go unless we want to retain the classic "SARP Romanization" as a Yamatai-specific thing.
 
I think ō was really hard to type in the day, and ô had an easy alt-key sequence. There's a Microsoft PowerToy that lets you type them in newer versions of Windows in more or less the same way I type them on Mac.

I have been using ō all over the place in posts and on the wiki, but if we want ô, a mass edit one way is as easy as the other.
 
After some additional research, I've decided that deciding on the use of Hepburn-style versus Kunrei-Shiki style romanization of Japanese is outside the scope of this project, which is to address errors in conversion to Unicode. If SARP sets a preference, it should be proposed as an alternate suggestion/idea thread.
 
yeah it's a rabbithole looking into it i guess just convert what was actually typed by the original author
 
Update: I've replaced all the errors I could replace using the Post Content Find/Replace add-on an regular expressions, so it looks like the remaining task is to recover the cut-off posts from backups.
 
RPG-D RPGfix
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