2009-08-21 - 2010-05-07
	by Alexander Ilyin


Question mark without a question.

Already long time ago I have noticed, that from some chatting people is/are falling standalone question mark or marks, which are not belonging at any sentence.
This is a bit confusing for a person, who sits on an other end, and sees them as a reply;
and normally, wish to chat with such interlocutor decreases, and after am noticing that the bug does repeat - wish to continue conversation disappears at all.
If standalone question mark(s) are falling out from you, you could check your chat client settings;
if it is IRC client, you should check, that there is set UTF-8 character encoding, which normally is used in IRC these days.
// not sure about this :  And if UTF-8 is set, then you still need to know, that it can encapsulate different character sets, like Win1251, Win1252, KOI ISO, Asian and similar.
Check, that when you are writing string, you have set keyboard to the proper language; for example if your keyboard is set to be in Chinese language, and chat channel is for English users, users on the other side could see those question marks, or some other unexpected symbols.

The reason of this also may be a virus in your computer, which is intensionally created to quarrel you with any person who you are conversating with, by inserting a confusing or offensing parts into your sentences.

Also, some people are intentionally using standalone question mark instead of word "Help" in their programs' menu, but that can not be a proper way; for example :  "File" then can be replaced with "1" or "F", "View" with "2" or "3" or "V" or some curly symbol, and so on.
And some are intentionally dropping one or few question marks instead of a sentence, ones possibly due to inability to tie own minds to produce anything what would look like a sentence;
others - to temporarily confuse an interlocutor, holding/representing/imagining him as opponent (in a flames or a single side flaming).

The actual bug has noticed long time ago before this manual had began to be writting, in 2006 year;
I was noticing, that it falls out from very much amount of people, who are chatting, and amount is not decreasing with time, but rising; so I finally have decided to write this description, which I hope will help.

Examples :
flaming
http://ai222.narod.ru/docs/qmark/1.png
wrong encoding
http://ai222.narod.ru/docs/qmark/1.txt
http://ai222.narod.ru/docs/qmark/2.txt

Have a nice chat.

Tags :  kbd bug, keyboard bug, question mark bug, no sentence bug, encoding bug.