Messageboard and mailbox upgrade
Dave (Guyslink) 8 Dec 2002 at 23:04 GMT

Today, we have updated our web site software to enhance our messageboard and mailbox facilities.

As well as adding a new message preview facility, our messaging software is now Unicode compliant. This means that messages may now include all flavours of international characters - for example, characters in arabic and cyrillic script, as well as ones with acute accents, umlauts etc.

In order to be able to type characters using a non-latin alphabet, you will need to configure your operating system accordingly. For example, for Windows 2000, this means adding support for the appropriate language on Control Panel/Regional Options/Input Locales.

To be able to view international characters properly you will need have appropriate Unicode-compliant fonts installed - we recommend using an up-to-date copy of the Arial font.

Also, for arabic script, right-to-left text will only be formatted and aligned correctly if you are using IE 6 or Netscape 6, and may sometimes be reversed by other browsers.

If you already have the correct fonts, you should see some Persian script below. But if you don't have a suitable font, it will probably appear as boxes or squares -

سلام خوش آمديد

This change only affects our messageboards and mailboxes. Just at the moment, it is still not possible to include international characters within membership profiles - but we'll be changing that very soon!