Errors have occured: Unallowed characters in video description.

[BiggsTrek]

I was hoping this would have been fixed with the upgrade, but I was just trying to copy'n'paste my description from TMO to TMU (for the UPM movies) and I get this error:

Errors have occured: Unallowed characters in video description.

Are the developers going to fix this? Or at least tell us what the evil characters are?

[sisch]

All I know is it doesn't like

/ : ' " ( )

and it especially doesn't like the "enter" tab if you want to start a new paragraph.

Some people seem to have mastered the art of posting descriptions so they look tidy.. not me. I get that character error too all the time, and so my descriptions look like a big, ugly heap of :001_9898:.

I tried with html - but as I don't really know what I'm doing, I get more error messages....

[kuroken]

I was hoping this would have been fixed with the upgrade, but I was just trying to copy'n'paste my description from TMO to TMU (for the UPM movies) and I get this error:

Errors have occured: Unallowed characters in video description.

Are the developers going to fix this? Or at least tell us what the evil characters are?
Hmmm, don't know - when you're uploading the movie, it's best not to put much of anything in the description - once it's up, you can put almost anything in there (or such has been my experience).

Are you talking about during the upload process or afterwards? I'll take a look at it.

Ken

[BiggsTrek]

I'm talking AFTER I've uploaded. I knew enough not to bother DURING. Figured I'd be OK to go back and update afterwards. Nope...

:(

[kuroken]

K, will take a look at it.

Ken

[JazzX]

I'm talking AFTER I've uploaded. I knew enough not to bother DURING. Figured I'd be OK to go back and update afterwards. Nope...

:(

Yes - nothing's changed.

If you press enter to start a new line in your description - you've just put in The Devil's Character!

An invisible character that it doesn't like.

You'll just have to do a military style run on sentence with no paragraphing. eg.

"SUPERMAN - this is my version of Superman - credits - Superman/Clarke Kent: superkiddo - Lois Lane: Lucy_lewd - Music: Conner Williams - etc."

Very unsatisfactory, I thought that would be one of the first things they fixed. It makes the presentation of the film really tatty and disjointed.

The description of the film is where you can attract viewers for your work. A well laid out, well presented description can make the difference between someone bothering to watch the film or not.

To give an obvious example, imagine someone has done a visual poem or even a music video. They want to show the lyrics in the description. They're forced to write this garbled mess:

"Once I saw a million faces, A million people, A million places. Not for me small things a-few, Just one fizog, Just one view. And then one day, My mind was set, One thing I wanted, One place was best. By your side I knew I'd be, A million heartbeats 'twixt you and me. For one thing was clear, it's still the case. There are a million features in your face."

Nobody's going to watch it if it's written like that.


I'm not sure about "" - I think they're ok after you've uploaded but I'm not sure about before - if they didn't fix The Devil's Character, I doubt they were bothered about that either.

I shall perform some more tests to see if anything's changed. The "" one is a stinker because it lets you waste hours uploading the film only for it to disappear - if they've not fixed that, then a bollocking is well and truly in order after they were made well aware of the issue and promised to put it right.

Watch this space.






PS. The poem's one of mine which I wrote while making this post. :tt1:

[kuroken]

Okay, Biggs, I copied and pasted the movie descriptions from TMO - took a lot of fiddling because the copy and paste from the TMO page added a lot of funky weird breaks - I still haven't cleaned it up completely, but see if you can go in and remove some of the extra spaces.

I actually think this is a new problem, not the old problem we had - it's giving me an illegal character with a carriage return, which didn't seem to be the case pre-upgrade after upload.

So lemme submit this as a bug.

[Edit - went ahead and uploaded something to their demo site and same problem - so it's not this site, it's the script - have submitted a bug report]

Ken

[JazzX]

And the results are in:

EXPERIMENT 1a: this experiment was in two parts. In this first part, an existing film of mine had "" deliberately edited into the description:

RESULT: PASS - the quotation marks were successfully shown in the new description


EXPERIMENT 1b: In this experiment, a single use of the return key (or "Devil's Character") was edited into the description

RESULT: SERIOUS FAIL - an error message complaining about illegal characters was displayed and the description was reset to what it had originally been.

This is extremely annoying when you take the time to make a detailed description the first time around - if RETURN is used, it complains, then resets to nothing; meaning that all your text is completely lost in an instant without warning.


EXPERIMENT 2: In this experiment, quotation marks were put into the description BEFORE uploading

RESULT: CATASTROPHIC FAIL - The uploading process was completed and then the film disappeared


EXPERIMENT 3: In this experiment, two lines of text were put into the description BEFORE upload with the return key used after the first line,

ie.

ggggg
hhhhh


RESULT: FAIL - although the film successfully uploaded onto the site, the formatting was replaced by a space. So the appearance of the text looked like this:

gggg hhhhh


CONCLUSION: The evidence shows that not a single bug fix by the programmers has been done in these areas - each of these problems existed before the upgrade.

The tests were performed using Firefox 3. Verification for Internet Explorer 7 to follow.

[JazzX]

Okay, Biggs, I copied and pasted the movie descriptions from TMO - took a lot of fiddling because the copy and paste from the TMO page added a lot of funky weird breaks - I still haven't cleaned it up completely, but see if you can go in and remove some of the extra spaces.

I actually think this is a new problem, not the old problem we had - it's giving me an illegal character with a carriage return, which didn't seem to be the case pre-upgrade after upload.

So lemme submit this as a bug.

[Edit - went ahead and uploaded something to their demo site and same problem - so it's not this site, it's the script - have submitted a bug report]

Ken

You're wrong there - this problem existed before - here are the results from my first experiments as shown on TMO before the "upgrade":


Just a word of warning for anyone uploading films to this site in its current state.

If, before you upload, you choose to use quotation marks "" during the description, you will sit through all that time only for the film to be lost during the conversion process.
Tests have shown that no other characters are affected (at least those involving the shift key or on their own). If you use [enter/return] to make separate paragraphs, your formatting will be lost after conversion, but it will all still be there.

Now - what about if you choose to make or edit the description after upload? (the safest bet) - and yet, with every description you try, you keep getting error messages?

Once your film is up, you can edit the description with quotation marks included, or any other characters - but you must not ever use the [ENTER/RETURN] key. That effectively means that your description may not be chopped up into paragraphs.

So, for instance:

Before upload, you entered this description:

Hi this is my film,

Enjoy!


when you see that on your film page, it looks like:

Hi this is my film,Enjoy!

If you try to put it right again by pressing enter before "enjoy", it'll come up with an unhelpful error message that says "you have used an illegal special character" (or something like that). Only the [ENTER] key is illegal, despite what it says - which makes it the "DE v i l [Evil]'S CHARACTER" - you can't see it, but it's there and the website doesn't like it.

Many brain cells died bringing you this information.

In summary - there is only one way for your film to appear to upload only for it to disappear at the end. For that to happen, you used quotation marks in the description.

NEVER, EVER USE QUOTATION MARKS IN THE DESCRIPTION OF YOUR FILM BEFORE UPLOAD - YOU'LL WASTE HOURS ONLY FOR IT TO COMPLETELY DISAPPEAR AT THE END

WHEN EDITING ON SITE, ONLY THE ENTER KEY WILL PREVENT YOU FROM SUCCESSFULLY CHANGING THE DESCRIPTION - NO OTHER CHARACTERS (INCLUDING QUOTATION MARKS) WILL STOP YOU

BE AWARE THAT ALL YOUR FORMATTING WILL BE REMOVED WHEN PUT ON THE SITE - SO YOU MIGHT AS WELL NEVER USE THE ENTER KEY IN YOUR DESCRIPTION, BEFORE OR AFTER UPLOAD


I should also add that the site insists on a description of at least 3 characters even before you upload. Just make sure you don't use quotation marks in those three characters.

The safest course of action is to upload with 123 as your description - then you can edit it all to your satisfaction once it's safely up on the site, but [ENTER] isn't allowed.


You are quite welcome to test these for yourself, but my experiments were thorough and conclusive.



It's pretty damning isn't it? They've done nothing. And that was the thread they came into promising to put all of these things right.

[kuroken]

The problem now, as Phil said, is after the upload, not before.

Previously you could go in and add carriage returns, etc. - as evidenced by http://www.tmunderground.com/watch/328a42e0eb13d585e4c2/Santa-Claus-is-Coming...For-You! which I updated post upload.

Now you can't - so I've put through a bug report - though it being 2 am-ish in Croatia where the company is located, it may be morning before I hear back.

Ken

[JazzX]

And the results of all the above experiments have now been verified as identical for Internet Explorer 7.

[JazzX]

The problem now, as Phil said, is after the upload, not before.

Previously you could go in and add carriage returns, etc. - as evidenced by http://www.tmunderground.com/watch/328a42e0eb13d585e4c2/Santa-Claus-is-Coming...For-You! which I updated post upload.

Now you can't - so I've put through a bug report - though it being 2 am-ish in Croatia where the company is located, it may be morning before I hear back.

Ken

I'm not sure how you did that - but as you can see, it certainly didn't work for me before or after the upgrade. I tested every character on the keyboard after uploading. The only one that stopped me submitting a description was RETURN.


EDIT: I've just tried using ENTER on the numberpad instead of RETURN - no dice, complains about illegal characters

[BiggsTrek]

Thanks Ken. Appreciate you doing that. Hopefully they'll fix it so you won't have to do it again (and again...)

I did try copying the TMO text into Notepad and copying it from that to TMU (normally removes any unwanted extraneous characters). Maybe TMU doesn't like combinations of LFs and CRs? Had issues with that moving text from different PCs (Amiga to IBM PC). Not that it matters, they'll fix it I'm sure.

:sorcerer:

[kuroken]

The carriage return isn't throwing errors any more....that was fixed about 6 hours ago. That's the good news.

The bad news is that carriage returns don't seem to do anything now. They appear in the edit video window just fine, but have no effect on the description on the movie page.

Oddly enough I can make changes in the admin panel to videos, using break commands, but when I try to do the same in the user edit video box, it strips them out.

I've replied to them, let them know the behavior we need, and will keep you appraised of what's happening.

Ken