Your message text is either empty or too short...

Okay, this is starting to drive me absolutely nuts. I'm trying to make a post to the Smalltalk forum. The post is 4,944 characters in length. Yet, each time I try to submit it, I get the message, "Your message text is either empty or too short ..."

I know this board has some problems with certain "special characters", but I've have gone over and over my post with a fine-toothed comb, trying to remove anything that might remotely resemble a "special character". I've removed a couple ampersands, I've removed a plus-sign. Everything left in the post is plain old English letters and punctuation. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what is stuffing up the posting. This isn't the first time this has happened.

I don't mean to be cranky, but I have this problem literally no place else. My browser is set to use ISO 8859-1 encoding, standard stuff. What's going on here?



I'll note that I am typing my posts directly into the forum text box, not composing my posts in a word processor and copy/pasting it in. So there are no proprietary word processor hidden encoding in my posts.

Okay, update. The post, finally posted successfully, is here: http://www.thespankinglibrary.org/forum/index.php?iframe=1&action=vthread&forum=8&top ic=3448#msg52287

I copied what I had written into a plain-text editor (Text Wrangler, on a Mac), to save it for later until I found the problem, and then pasted it back into the text box, one paragraph at a time. The first two paragraphs posted successfully. The third paragraph turned out to be the problem, as it refused to post when I pasted it in in its entirety. Going over it, there were no "special characters", so I made a guess that the forum didn't like the word, "incest". I changed that to "i-n-c-e-s-t". That didn't work. So I changed it to, "(that word that means sex between blood relatives)". Still didn't work. GAH!

My next step was to paste in that third paragraph one sentence at a time. And every sentence posted successfully with no problem. The following paragraphs also went up with no problems.

So I'm at a loss here. I can't figure out what the problem was with the third paragraph.

I have had that problem too and ended up uploading my post a few lines at a time and clicked "preview." If i saw text i knew i was fine so when I reached the lines that had the problem I simpply retyped it and then uploaded the rest. next time I run into the problem i will narroiw it down firtuther

I had this problem with contributing to the Alternative Worlds section. The Head Librarian advised me that there must be something in my text the system was interpreting as "end message".

Here's a suggestion:
Paste the text to notepad.
Save that file.
Open that file - there shouldn't be any special characters left.
Paste from there.

Or just email the notepad file to the library.

Goodgulf
Well, I'm posting from a Mac, so no Notepad. But, yeah, plain-text editor (BBEdit, TextWrangler). I've been on the Internet since 1996. I'm savvy. I know HTML and CSS.

Sorry if it sounded as if I talking down to you, but from painful experience I've learned that it is better to give extremely detailed instructions even an idiot can follow than to assume that the person reading knows how to turn on a computer. Alas, this means that I often come off as condescending, which I don't mean to be.

Shudder. Sorry, I just had a flashback to the time I was trying to explain how to attach an attachment to a file. The person kept saying "why would I do anything with that paperclip? I'm trying to email it so I don't have to write a memo and send it out with a paperclip".

Goodgulf