09-19-2016, 11:59 AM
I'm pretty sure I've not brushed anything off here. In fact, I made a huge push and some significant upgrades to finally properly support accented characters - something we've never been able to do before. I agree that accuracy is important and it's why I said to begin with that we should edit them in where appropriate.
However, you do seem to be brushing off a valid counter-argument so let me spell it out again. The dropping of the Ō character from this particular game was proposed to solve a problem with no other solution. This is no longer a matter of accuracy or respect for the language. It's not catering to English or non-English speaking visitors. We're not limited to the ASCII character set any more - the entire site, front and back, is running on UTF-8. The problem is that MySQL's regular expression engine, which is required for the queries generating the letter bar, is not UTF-8 enabled. It behaves unpredictably with multi-byte characters (which accented characters are) and, in this case, is returning it as both a special character (not in the range of [a-z]) and a normal letter ("o", after transliteration of the lowercase Ō). There is literally no way to fix this short of removing the accented character or waiting until the MySQL team update the encoding for their REGEXP selector. To avoid confusion, I've chosen to remove the accent from the O until such a time that multi-byte character handling is improved. The fact that I did so while referencing a silly image was just to lighten the tone a bit.
However, you do seem to be brushing off a valid counter-argument so let me spell it out again. The dropping of the Ō character from this particular game was proposed to solve a problem with no other solution. This is no longer a matter of accuracy or respect for the language. It's not catering to English or non-English speaking visitors. We're not limited to the ASCII character set any more - the entire site, front and back, is running on UTF-8. The problem is that MySQL's regular expression engine, which is required for the queries generating the letter bar, is not UTF-8 enabled. It behaves unpredictably with multi-byte characters (which accented characters are) and, in this case, is returning it as both a special character (not in the range of [a-z]) and a normal letter ("o", after transliteration of the lowercase Ō). There is literally no way to fix this short of removing the accented character or waiting until the MySQL team update the encoding for their REGEXP selector. To avoid confusion, I've chosen to remove the accent from the O until such a time that multi-byte character handling is improved. The fact that I did so while referencing a silly image was just to lighten the tone a bit.