TOPIC:

We have a customized New Member Welcome Message that is automatically sent to members who just approved their addition to our email list. The message looks OK on the website, but characters are missing in the sent email. For example, the following sentence "Un compte à votre nom a été créé sur ce site web." is sent by email as "Un compte votre nom a t cr sur ce site web". The missing accented characters makes our message difficult to read and does not look good.

We have been using our French welcome message without any problem since February 2017 and until October 6, 2019 (last time the message was sent correctly). The first instance of the problem was observed on November 3.

Daniel Riendeau
Kanata Francophone Toastmasters (#5146515)

If you use multi-byte encoded characters, those will get stripped out as they cause problems for some of our email code.

UTF-8 encoded characters should work fine.

Also see: support.toastmastersclubs.org/2011-10-23...club-mailing-address

I agree that we should be careful with non-English characters, but French is not that exotic. Accented characters in the latin alphabet are well supported by UTF-8.

It seems to me that the New Member Welcome Message is no longer UTF-8 compliant and now only supports basic ASCII characters in the 0-127 range. If you can solve this issue, it would be appreciated.

If you are using Microsoft windows what French character set are you using? Is it UTF-8?

Windows 10 by default uses utf-16

Hi Brian,

How do I check which character set I am using?

When I wrote the welcome message back in 2017, I was using Windows 10. So I guess the message is encoded in UTF-16? If that's the case, how do I convert it to UTF-8 so that the accented characters stop disappearing?

More importantly, why has this problem started only recently? And why is this problem limited only to the New Member Welcome Message while, for example, accented characters in the agenda are rendered properly both on the web and in emails?

I am sorry but we do not offer PC support. There are just too many different configurations for us to support.

I suggest you check with google.

Steve,

A year ago I submitted a similar issue about accented letters not showing up properly (see support.toastmastersclubs.org/2011-10-23...accented-letters-in-meeting-notes ). You solved that issue quickly and efficiently.

I was hoping the current issue would be solvable in a similar way. I am attaching a screenshot of the New Member Welcome Message as typed into the FTH interface. I expected a "what you see is what you get" philosophy from FTH but I suppose it's more complicated than that. As I stated before, even though the accented letters are showing up properly in the message box, when the new members receive this message by email, the accented characters are gone. This is a recent problem – we created this message in 2017 and had no problem until last October.

This specific message box does not include a "Source" button that would have allowed me to use HTML codes (eacute, etc.). Otherwise, I would have tried that.

I appreciate that you are doing FTH support on your free time and I will not insist any further. Thank you for your attention.

To anyone reading this,

Sorry, I said I would not insist any further, but I discovered something else and I need to make a correction. I mentioned that the missing character problem was limited to the New Member Welcome Message and I just realized this is incorrect.

Please find attached a screenshot of our agenda (a portion of it) sent by email before the meeting, and a screenshot of the same agenda as currently shown on the website (FYI, the printed version has the same content as the web version). Other than the obvious change of status for the speech evaluator role (I had a busy night), I note that:

• Headings: the accented characters are absent in the email version (e.g. "Séance" → "Sance"). The cute little ⏱ emoji is gone too!
• Role descriptions: the accented characters are... still showing up!

I must admit, I find it very frustrating that the only decent response I got so far from FTH is that somehow I did not use UTF-8 encoding, as if this was something obvious that any end user should know about. And if I did, how did I manage to use UTF-8 encodings for the role descriptions but not for the headings?

There is a lot of information available on the Internet about Unicode, character encoding, etc. (yes, I use Google, can you imagine! ) but all the information I found is intended for developpers, not the average user (for anyone not too familiar with character encoding, I recommend this excellent article by Joel Spolsky).

I just found and downloaded a Chrome extension that changes the character encoding of websites. I tested it on our agenda and our welcome message – they appear to be both UTF-8 encoded; if I switch to any other encoding, the accented characters in the welcome message and the agenda headings are garbled (but the agenda descriptions remain unaffected – weird).

I mentioned several times that this issue had started recently, yet this seemingly does not raise an eyebrow?

It wasn't too big a deal for me when I thought the problem was limited to the New Members Welcome Message, but the agenda is a critical part of our club experience. Still, I would be OK with a response like "we have not found the issue yet" or "we can't solve the problem right now". Otherwise, if FTH is not interested to solve this issue, I would like this to be clarified.

Sincerely,