Some special letters turned to question mark on the site

  • Unknown's avatar
    ugyvedgsz · Member ·

    Some special letters turned to question mark on the site

    Hi,

    the site’s language is Hungarian and so it contains some special letters, like ő, ű.
    These letters turned to a question mark for a while and these errors cannot be fixed.
    When change the question marks to the original letters in edit mode the site can not be updated: by clicking to update the site it does not save the changes at all.
    The required updates are done, and the issue is still remains in different browsers, like Chrome and Edge and on different devices.
    So how is it possible the solve this?

    Thank you in advance!

    WP.com: Unknown
    Jetpack: Yes
    Correct account: Yes

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • aleone89 · Staff ·

    Hello there,

    Many thanks for reaching out.

    Can you confirm if you’ve downloaded the theme from here: https://wordpress.com/theme/rockfield ?

    Also, can you tell me what plugins are installed on the site please?

    Many thanks.

  • Unknown's avatar
    ugyvedgsz · Member ·

    Hello,

    thank you for your fast reply.
    I’ve downloaded the theme for the website from the linked site. Also the Rackhost theme is the used one actually.

    I’m not sure if the plug-ins which are downloaded and turned on are automatically applicable on the site specifically, but I can specify those installed, turned on and updated plug-ins under my account:

    Akismet Anti-Spam
    All in One SEO
    AMP
    CoBlocks
    Crowdsignal Forms
    Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights
    Gutenberg
    Jetpack
    Classic Editor
    Layout Grid
    Page Optimize
    WordPress.com Editing Toolkit

    I try my best to give you proper answers, however I’m not a professional, so sorry if I’m wrong.

    Many thanks

  • Unknown's avatar
    helper-heroponriki · Member ·

    Thanks for that – you did that correctly! :)

    I don’t think it’s a problem with your theme but with the database encoding for your site. However, your site is not hosted with WordPress.com but instead a site using the open-source WordPress software (from WordPress.org) but hosted elsewhere.

    We cannot access files or data for sites that are hosted elsewhere, so WordPress.com staff can only assist with sites that are hosted on our servers. But, I can get you pointed in the right direction.

    The ? errors with those special characters indicates an incorrect encoding issue in your site’s database – however in the tests we ran, it looks like you are using UTF-8 which should be correct for displaying those characters properly on the front end. You can verify that by viewing the page source of your homepage and you’ll see <meta charset="UTF-8" /> in the top of the source.

    You can narrow down whether or not the issue is with one of the editor plugins you’re using by disabling everything except Akismet and Jetpack (which won’t impact the editor), then updating your homepage using the correct characters and see if they save properly.

    If that doesn’t help, reach out to your hosting provider and have them look into your MySQL database and see why those characters aren’t encoding properly. Since they’re hosting your site’s files, they also have access to those files and are the best ones to help you figure this out.

    If you still have trouble or your host is not able to help, please reach out to the WordPress community for guidance:

    https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting

    I hope that helps!

  • Unknown's avatar
    ugyvedgsz · Member ·

    Thank you for all of the information and advice.
    I tried the steps which you suggested, however, after changing the characters and saving the site, it’s still not working, the ?s did not change. None of them, however I tried in different blocks also.
    Now, I try to solve that with the host.
    Can you provide me some specific articles about this issue on WordPress?

    Thank you in advance for your help!

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    I’m afraid we don’t have any specific articles about this. WordPress.com, that where you are now, is not the same thing as the open source version of WordPress that you’re using, and we’re not developers for or experts on that version of WordPress. We can make an educated guess about the issue, and point you in the right direction to get help with it, but that’s as far as we’re able to go.

    The WordPress.org community who you’ll find in the forums my colleague linked to above are the people who make the WordPress software, so they should be able to troubleshoot this with you further.

  • Unknown's avatar
    ugyvedgsz · Member ·

    Thank you for all of the information, I was hoping that the issue is easier to solve, but your answer and the host’s response made me clear that something within the SQL went wrong, without any modification or human touch.
    Thank you again for all the help!

    KR

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