unable to place ad

I've been trying to place advertisements of machine parts for sale. A friend is disposing of a machine from his factory and I thought some of the bits might be useful to model engineers. The first, for a leadscrew assembly was placed without difficulty, but the second, for a large motor/gearbox unit, is not accepted ( after a while) and a message apologises for a site problem being responsible for inability to place my ad. What went wrong, and why did it have to happen whilst I was typing in my second ad ?

Will the problem be fixed soon ? I do hope so,

Ken.

Hi Ken,

Sorry to have missed your post.

Without the error message to pass on to the web developer, I can't get the answer your questions.

Has the error gone away now.

Neil

Hello Neil, just died again and the problem persists. Here's copy of the error message, it appears twice as shown, after about a minute from pressing the 'place ad' button.

• Sorry - the website has an error and the page you requested cannot be displayed at this time. Please try again later.

Sorry - the website has an error and the page you requested cannot be displayed at the moment. Please try again later.

Hope you can sort it out soon,

Regards,

Ken.

Neil, should have read 'just TRIED again', b….y spell checker getting above itself again,

Ken.

OK Ken,

It isn't the most informative message, and it looks to be one generated by your browser, rather than us.

Are you using any special characters in your ad? They can upset the system.

Anyway I have raised a bug report, but I suspect they may not be able to replicate this issue.

You might consider submitting an ad for the mags using the form here instead:

**LINK**

Just scroll to the bottom of the page. I don't need a scan of the form, just email me the essentials, keeping to the word limit.

Neil

There have been quite a few other adds placed since Ken raised the issue so it seems more likely to be his end than a fault with the site.

J

The web developers must work late, he's just emailed me!

Neil

I've just placed one as ken so looks like it could be his end.

J

Hi Neil and Jason, thanks for looking into this, but I'm blowed if I can see what I'm doing that the system doesn't like - no special characters for example, just a photo and descriptive text. I've left line spaces here and there to make details clearer, but surely that can't be it, can it ? I hadn't thought about the problem being at my end as I had just placed another, similar ad with no problem, and the error message said THE SITE had a problem. Just goes to show that you can't believe everything you read, doesn't it ?

What a pity I hadn't copied the ad to you as a message, then you could have tried placing it as a test …. hmmm, might think about that if I can't get it to work soon.

Regards,

Ken.

Ken yopu could try a simple test ad like the one I did in your name that can be see to the right, if you get the message again copy any details.

J

Hi Ken

Please can you email your text and image to me, [email protected]? This is definitely a website error, and it will be something very small in your text/image that is causing the problem, it may be an apostrophe or the image filename, but I'll be able to tell and fix it when I have your ad details. Sorry for the inconvenience, I will sort it out for you

Thanks

Katy

I sent copy to Katy and she has now sorted the problem and placed tha ad for me. Thanks Katy !

I'm now hoping to receive a simple explanation of what caused the problem, so that I can avoid it happening again.

Katy confirmed that this was an M.E. site problem, and tracked it down to an apostrophe in the photograph file name, where the title was abbreviated to " motor/g'box". This was mot something I could see, and even if I had I wouldn't have expected normal punctuation to be a problem, but apparently apostrophes indicate to the computer that an instruction is following, to be ended by a second apostrophe. When the second did not appear the computer took fright and suspected me of being an invader, so shut me out. A classic case of ' The computer says no!'

Ken.