Forum breaks when using Windows-1251 Cyrillic/Russian encoding

Support
1

It looks like Discourse forums don’t load if the character encoding is set to Windows-1251 for Russian.

To reproduce, set the character encoding to “Cyrillic (Windows-1251)” and visit the homepage of a forum. It will just be a blank page. There are error messages in the console that look something like this:

Uncaught SyntaxError: Invalid regular expression: 
/^[^A-Za-zГЂ-ÖØ-öø-КёМЂ-Цђа Ђ-бїїв°Ђ-п¬њп·ѕ-п№Їп»Ѕ-пїї]*[Ц‘-Яїп¬ќ-п·Ѕп№°-п»ј]/: 
Range out of order in character class
    at new RegExp (<anonymous>)

(I’ve only tried it with two Discourse forums – Meta Discourse and my main forum.)

1 Like
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Why would you do that? Discourse uses UTF-8 and that works for Russian too.

4 Likes
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I wouldn’t do it myself. :slight_smile:

A user in Russia was getting a blank page. It took several hours to track down the cause and I couldn’t reproduce it until I set my browser’s encoding to Windows-1251.

I’m wondering if other Russian language users are experiencing blank pages. It’s apparently set on his computer at the OS level (Windows), and there isn’t an easy way to change a browser’s character encoding any more without some manual configuration. The browsers’ encoding auto-detection features aren’t working well. We tried Chrome and Firefox.

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We have several forums working in Russia. There is no problem if, as written above, UTF-8 is used. We did not experiment or set the encoding Windows-1251. What for? UTF-8 works for everything.

There was no blank page on any of the forums. The browser does not switch to windows-1251.

I tried in 3 browsers to force to expose Windows-1251. If the forum is in utf-8 we only gets the wrong encoding. A blank page is not observed.

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cp1251 isn’t dead yet, so I’m not stunned to hear that some users still have a browser which defaults to it.

As of this month(16/12/19) a little over 11% of .ru sites use windows-1251.

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I’m not sure why you aren’t seeing it there. I used this browser plugin in Chromium to test it. (Firefox seems to disable the character encoding menu on some sites.)

I just tried with a third Discourse forum, and that one doesn’t load either.

I don’t know why that user has the OS set to Windows-1251. I’m going to try to find out how often it’s happening.

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Interesting, please look, with this plugin there is a white page on the forum: https://toxu.ru I watched the encoding windows-1251 on this site.

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When I visit your site and set it to Windows-1251, I get a blank page and these errors (same as the other sites).

error
error1920×586 83.6 KB

I’ve just heard an update from the user though — they are using Windows XP with Chrome 49, so that is probably the source of the problem.

I did a quick search through the analytics and there have been 281 visits by 85 users on Windows XP in the past 28 days. I don’t feel like our site needs to support Windows XP, but I’d like to figure out a way to at least serve those people a “please upgrade your browser to use this site” message.

I’m going to recommend that this user upgrades the OS, at least to Linux.

3 Likes
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Chrome dropped XP in April 2016. Firefox dropped in June 2018 so it’s a better alternative than Chrome. But in the end the user should upgrade ASAP.

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I’m going to warn them about the security risks and offer to assist with Linux if they want to do that.

During the debugging I made a long list of everything to check for when those requests come in. I need to add “Windows NT 5.1” and browser versions to the list for next time.

3 Likes