After upgrading my hosting plan to a PHP version, I got things done within a day . Now I want to create a second account for my german site. Does the Coop Ads support German "Umlaut"? I am wondering because I have seen one of the ads with wrong characters. Thanks.
Yeah the coop ad network does support it because its UTF-8 encoded. However alot of pages are not UTF-8 encoded, most are likely to be ISO-8859-1 or similar, which means some chars get screwed up.
Sure it does, because the when a UTF-8 character is displayed on a ISO-8859-1 the character screws up. So the anchor text changes, normally they go horrible like: “, which means nothing to nobody!
There is a few wrong coded 'ae' German sites in Ad Network. Pity, that their owners loose their chance. Szy.
Umlaut is supported in ISO-8859-1, but the ad network uses UTF-8, this is the problem. There are functions in PHP to convert encoding. Maybe the owner of the network could build this into the network script, you could always ask. Maybe he could add a new parameter like: &oe=utf-8 or &oe=iso-8859-1
So, Shawn, could you be so nice and improve encoding of non-standard characters? The most of Polish websites use ISO-8859-2, so it's impossible to show correctly characters as Polish ą,ć,ę,ł,ń,ó,ś,ź,ż or German umlauts. Szy.
Encoding can vary for every page regardless of language. Unicode (UTF-8) is the only encoding that supports ALL languages. There are no plans to support any other encodings.
So what's recommended for a non-english ad in the Co-op, using language-specific characters or not? What are the chances of beeing displayed properly in the community?
I have ads with Polish diacritic characters. First, I was confused as you are, because of wrong encoded words. But after a while I realized, that most of Coop's members do use Unicode, so there is still lot of sites, where our links behave correctly - they link with correct anchor. So, don't be afraid, you can still make a big score with non-English characters. Szy.
I have found an example for a screwed umlaut on my own site (see bottom left): I don't know much about ISO and UTF, but I know the site on which the ad is generated is hosted in Germany and the site and my computer are fully umlaut-compatible. Therefore it still seems to be a Co-op issue. Am I missing something?
The ad network ads are unicode (UTF-8) encoded. There is some info in the FAQ about it: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/faq.html
I have found a thread about utf8_decode at http://de2.php.net/manual/de/function.utf8-decode.php. This function decodes data, assumed to be UTF-8 encoded, to ISO-8859-1. Is anybody here who knows how to implement it into the ad_network.php file?
Ok, no one seems to hear me. Anyway, I changed all umlaut characters in my ads into HTML characters: ä > ä ö > ö ü > ü Since HTML coded umlauts are supported both by UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1, I hope it will work on the WWW. And coop reviewers won't reject them.