Last week’s upgrade to UTF-8 went fine—except that we neglected to upgrade the mail system to the same format until after the last member update went out. As such, the update last week contained erroneous characters.

The main gist is that members who joined prior to May 15 should review their profiles, articles, cut-lines and events. If there is a problem, it will be in the form of quotation marks, umlauts, etc. appearing as question marks (in Internet Explorer) and strange symbols in Firefox. The errors will only appear for some members—those that happened to copy and paste their information from external sources into the site forms.

We also know that some members may have used special characters in their login information. If so, you can go to www.artisticnetwork.net/lost.php and enter your email address. The site will send you your login info—and when logged in you can update to accurate characters.

In other news, we added an upgrade to the guestbooks that changed the layout of entries slightly. We also fixed an oversight where entries were not storing visitor websites. There is now a blurb on managing your guestbook at www.artisticnetwork.net/arts/225/ .

On a final note, we want to remind members that the best way to get visitors from the site is to post articles. Also, posting images with articles is more likely to attract the eyes of visitors. Some members have not yet learned the difference between posting images to their profiles (which are intended to tell visitors about yourself and/or organization) and articles (which are intended to show off your work and talent). Profiles appear in the Member Directory, while articles appear in the topic menus in the navigation of every page.

You can always log in to the site and read more on the FAQ page.