Hey everyone!

We've made another small change behind the scenes here at BigCloset TopShelf, and hopefully it's one that will make posting stories, blogs, and comments a little less frustrating.

Some of you may have experienced an issue where you tried to submit something, only to have the site throw an error instead of saving your work. We've discovered that, in some cases, the culprit was something as simple as an emoji or a special character that found its way into your writing.

Yes, really. An emoji could break your post.

So, what did we do?

We've added a small custom plugin called BCTS UTF-8 Filter that checks text as it's being submitted and removes certain characters that our current database doesn't know how to handle.

For example, if you copied some text from your phone, a word processor, or another website, you might have accidentally included a character that TopShelf couldn't save. Previously, that could result in an error and potentially leave you wondering whether your work had been saved at all.

Now, instead of allowing those characters to cause a problem, the plugin attempts to remove them before the text is saved.

If the plugin removes anything, you should see a message that says:

Unsupported four-byte characters were removed from your text.

Most normal text, including accented letters, curly quotation marks, and everyday punctuation, should remain completely unaffected.

Does this mean we can't use emoji?

Not exactly!

Some emoji will still work, while others won't. It depends on how the individual character is stored, rather than what it looks like.

We're not banning emoji, and we're certainly not trying to limit anyone's creativity. We're just working around a technical limitation in the current version of TopShelf.

One thing to keep in mind: if a character is removed, it won't be replaced with anything. So if you happen to put an emoji between two words without spaces, those words could end up joined together.

Is this a permanent solution?

Nope. This is more of a temporary patch while we work toward a better solution.

TopShelf has been around for quite a while, and some of the technology behind it reflects that history. We're working on a longer-term database upgrade that will allow the site to properly handle these characters without needing to remove them.

Unfortunately, that's not quite as simple as flipping a switch. We need to make sure everything is backed up, tested, and compatible before making changes that could affect everyone's stories, blogs, and comments.

Until then, this little plugin should help prevent at least one type of posting error.

What should you do?

For the most part, nothing different!

Keep writing, keep posting, and keep sharing your stories.

As always, we recommend keeping a copy of your writing somewhere other than TopShelf, especially when working on longer stories or chapters. If you see the character removal notice, take a quick look at your saved post to make sure everything still reads the way you intended.

And if you're still experiencing errors when submitting stories, blogs, or comments, please let us know! The more information you can give us about what you were doing and what happened, the easier it is for us to track down the problem.

We're continuing to make improvements behind the scenes, including work on some of the other posting and session issues we've been investigating recently.

Thanks for your patience, your feedback, and for continuing to make BigCloset TopShelf the community it is.

-Kirstyn