Disappearing postings

[Cadet]

So I am going to try to summarize all the issues we seem to have found.
I am not sure if this is complete or not but it is some progress I hope.

Cadet, typing directly worked for me. Copying and pasting from notepad or Microsoft Word does not.

Hope that helps!

Cadet,

Copy/paste from Word is when I'm getting blank posts too. Directly typing has worked.

I am still having this problem both on phone and with direct typing on laptop

I only can post if very short

I am still having this problem both on phone and with direct typing on laptop

In the meantime, the UBB expert who has been helpful to us over the years is suggesting that basically users are compiling their posts in a word processor, and it's converting regular apostrophes and quotes to curly quotes, which causes issues.
So for now, the best advice we can give is to instruct users to NOT use a word processor to make their posts.
An editor such as Notepad doesn' insert its own characters and should work better.

Silly question, but do you all try the preview button before submitting?

Cadet, I just discovered something interesting.
I tried pasting a message in here that blanked out twice in Steve's thread and sure enough it blanked out here too.
The odd thing is if I paste it in the Quick Reply window and then hit "Switch to Full Reply Screen" then when it does, the window blanks out.
If I hit "Preview Reply" it still shows up.
So I used this trick and tried to cut the message down to see if I could locate the offending element in it.
Strangely I still can't figure it out.
It seems to not like the length of the post rather than any particular piece of text in it.
I can delete the first half and it will magically display, or I can leave the first half and delete the second half and it will display.
But I can't leave the whole thing.
I will post the message in two parts so the guru can look to see if there's anything there that might point at the problem.

This applys to previous quote

It wasn't anything I wrote, it was something I quoted, and it may very well be what Virginia mentioned that's causing it.
It was the apostrophe in the word "doesn't" and "I'm".
I edited only those 3 apostrophes in his quote that was blanking out and now it's showing up fine:

Cadet, I just noticed that mtb1981 posted a blank post and in the next post he mentioned it was send from his cell phone so maybe it's notation characters on certain cell phones that are causing the problem:

(Apparently posting from my ipad causes issues so I'm trying again from my laptop.)

The issue with the blank messages is the apostrophes and quotes in Word (maybe other characters and word processors as well). Even when you save the Word document to text, it preserves the special characters for apostrophes and quotes.

I copied and pasted my Word document into Notepad++ and changed the encoding to UTF-8 and you can see, and correct, all of the special characters.

Also the length of the posts MAY have something to do with this issue too, although I still do not understand why.