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February 1, 2008

10:29 am | 0 recommendations | 3 comments

The Dreaded Apostrophe

| posted by Peter O'Donnell

On behalf of the many Irish members whose names include apostrophes, I'm wondering what can be done to fix how the website handles this character.

Imagine my horror to see the message, 'Welcome back Peter O'Donnell' - can't something be done about that?

True, it may be an artifact of the old system - perhaps even my original sign-up - but I can't imagine I'm the only person affected by this problem. I also realize that, if VISA corp haven't figured out how to put apostrophes on credit cards, then you aren't alone in being stumped by the dreaded character.

Hoping,

Peter O'Donnell

Tags: Technology, Design, beta test, beta tester, fast company, site design, site functionality, user experience
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Comments | 3

February 8, 2008 at 12:30pm

Tim Tymchyshyn

at least you have vowels in your last name

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February 1, 2008 at 2:50pm

Thomas Achtemichuk

Hi Peter,
This was caused by a couple things. First, all the Company of Friends members that were imported were done so with the apostrophes in their names encoded as ' which is how the old CoF software expected things to be. Unfortunately, this is not how our new system works. I've fixed your name in the database, and it should be appearing properly in most places.

The second issue was a slight bug in how text is filtered, and sometimes ends up double-encoding apostrophes. This is what's causing your name to be improperly displayed in the blue bar at the top. I've made the necessary changes, and they should be rolled out in the next few days.

Cheers,
Thomas Achtemichuk
Web Developer, FastCompany.com

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February 1, 2008 at 11:17am

Saabira Chaudhuri

Hi Peter - Thanks for letting us know. This is definitely high on our long list of features to fix- we will get to it, for the Irish and everyone else!

--
Saabira Chaudhuri

Associate Editor, FastCompany.com

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