Crazy forum software behaviour?

[JohnW2]

When I just attempted to post a PM, about matters electrical, to a member of this forum I got:

... as a result of which I had to go around changing all my "Ω" to "ohms". This seems new, and is surely daft for a site which has forums that will often have messages with multiple occurrences of the "Ω" symbol?

Kind Regards, John

 

[bernardgreen]

Things change, resistance is futile

 

[plugwash]

Seems to work for me with both omega and ohm sign..............

 

[DIYnot]

There have been no recent changes in that area of the software recently, but I will investigate.

 

[JohnW2]

There have been no recent changes in that area of the software recently, but I will investigate.

Thanks.

It's a 'first' for me. As you will know, I have often suffered from my posts going into your 'moderation queue' and on some occasions it has been suggested that this may have been due to to containing several non-alpha-numeric characters, but I've never seen an explicit message about 'multiple Other Characters' such as the one above.

Mind you, it was a PM, not a forum post. One imagines (hopes!) that PMs cannot be subjected to moderation (since one would like to think that mods cannot read them), so maybe the is the PM equivalent of 'moderation'??

Kind Regards, John

 

[JohnW2]

Seems to work for me with both omega and ohm sign..............

I'm not quite sure what you mean, given that the 'ohm sign' is omega. It's also nearly always worked for me (e.g. with multiple Ω or multiple ²) - although, as above, there are occasions of which the software has grabbed a forum post 'for moderation', possibly because of multiple occurrences of these symbols. As I also said, maybe what I've just experienced is the 'PM equivalent' of moderation of a forum post?

I'm going to try some experiments, so please bear with me!

Kind Regards, John

 

[plugwash]

I'm not quite sure what you mean, given that the 'ohm sign' is omega.

U+2126 OHM SIGN vs U+03A9 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA

Though i'm not sure how common "OHM SIGN" is, I get the impression it may be a lot less common than "MICRO SIGN".

 

[JohnW2]

U+2126 OHM SIGN vs U+03A9 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA

Well, I never knew that . I do, however, have to wonder "why?". In what material way does the "ohm sign" differ from a capital omega (and why?)? Regardless of character sets, the symbol for Ohms surely is, and always has been a "capital Greek omega", hasn't it (defined very long before anyone knew what a 'character set' was!) ...

Kind Regards, John

 

[JohnW2]

OK, so what happens if I try to create a forum post which contains lots of Ω symbols - like this one here .. Ω, and then this one .. Ω, and then another ... Ω, and then lots more that are the same as Ω, as in Ω Ω Ω Ω Ω Ω ??

Kind Regards, John

 

[DIYnot]

I have found the cause of the issue, just working on a solution to stop it from happening in the future.

 

[plugwash]

Well, I never knew that . I do, however, have to wonder "why?". In what material way does the "ohm sign" differ from a capital omega (and why?)?

Good question, Unicode considers the ohm sign to be a compatibility character, I presume it was added because some legacy encoding had the two characters distinct, but before this discussion I had no idea which one. So I decided to do a quick search in the data from .https://github.com/unicode-org/icu-data/tree/main/charset/data/ucm

I found GB18030, but that's a modern encoding designed to cover all of Unicode, so I don't think it counts. All of the other results seem to be IBM EBCDIC
Japanese code pages.

Micro sign on the other hand is there because ISO-8859-1, the encoding that was 1:1 mapped to the first 256 unicode code points had it.

 

[JohnW2]

Aha - maybe I was right in saying that what I experienced was the PM equivalent of a forum post that got intercepted for moderation. I've just tried posting a "Ω-full" message to this forum, and what has happened is ...

Kind Regards, John

 

[JohnW2]

I have found the cause of the issue, just working on a solution to stop it from happening in the future.

Thanks again. As you will see in my post #12, it seems that what I experienced probably was the 'PM equivalent' of a forum post being intercepted for moderation - so the underlying issue probably exists (with different consequences) with both PMs and forum posts.

It goes without saying that, at least in this Electrics forum, there are bound to be some posts with multiple occurrences of "Ω" and/or "²", and sometimes other symbol characters, so perhaps the software could be taught to ignore those particular 'Other Characters'?

Kind Regards, John

 

[JohnW2]

Good question, Unicode considers the ohm sign to be a compatibility character, I presume it was added because some legacy encoding had the two characters distinct, but before this discussion I had no idea which one. ...

Fair enough, but that merely moves my question back in time. Given that Mr Ohm, or someone else around the same time, decided that an upper case Greek omega was the symbol for ohms, why, I wonder, did that "legacy encoding" have a symbol for 'ohms' which was distinct (and maybe fractionally different) from that for an upper-case omega?

Kind Regards, John

 

[plugwash]

I would guess that someone decided to include a block of "technical symbols" and someone (possibly the same person possibly not) decided to include a block of "greek letters". Japanese encodings had to include multi-byte characters anyway, so there wouldn't have been such presure to trim down the encoding size as there was with western single-byte encodings.