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A couple users have flagged question 5525, suggesting it be merged into question 6032. Right now, 5525 is closed as a duplicate of 6032. But when either jkerian and I try to actually perform the merge, it doesn't work. It just says "oops":

oops

This seems like a bug.

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    Considering that after we were trying to do this merge, the whole stack exchange network seems to have gone down... well... I don't think we broke it...
    – jkerian
    May 16, 2014 at 17:25

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Will be fixed in the next build. Keep an eye out for 2014.5.16.1611. (I haven't merged the questions. That's on you once the build goes out.)

The gist of the problem here is that y'all use a weird alphabet that doesn't fit into reasonable column widths once encoded. ;)

That is, we move people's "favorite" votes to the resulting merged question and record where those votes were originally cast in the database for future reference. We used to record the full URL of the original question, including the title, and from now on we'll use the short version that just includes the post's ID.

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    You should read this really old article by some guy called Joel about "weird alphabets": The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
    – hippietrail
    May 17, 2014 at 5:06
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    @hippietrail Although not everything in that article is still accurate. RFC3629 limited UTF-8 to U+10FFFF a month after it was published, and no characters beyond that point were ever defined, so the bit about 5- and 6-octet UTF-8 sequences isn't really true.
    – user1478
    May 17, 2014 at 6:23
  • @snailboat: True indeed, I ran up against that very issue years back when I was contributing encoded plain text import/export to AbiWord.
    – hippietrail
    May 17, 2014 at 6:48
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    @hippietrail I've read it. Alas, the post merge code predates us launching sites involving other languages. We're fixing all these issues as we come across them.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    May 17, 2014 at 16:53
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    I should've really included a winky (-; Also I guess I'm responsible since it was me who suggested merging the two questions that caused this in the first place. Sorry for the breakage but happy it's now fixed!
    – hippietrail
    May 21, 2014 at 13:03

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