About Story Formatting and Problems

[Paolo]

I don't know if it's still the case, but as a brief explanation of why stories get "mangled" by the auto-formatting script...

The formatting script that EA uses (when I was in charge) is not new. In fact, it's older than Talula's underwear. When I handed the job over to Plix after the last hack, it wasn't doing such a good job with Word documents from versions of Word new as or newer than Office XP.

What happens is that Word likes to fill a document with tons of extraneous code that isn't needed for a simple web view. There's really no way around this, either.

Back in the day, you could post a story and when you had typed in the title to submit it, you could hit space bar, hyphen, no space, type STRIP no space, and that would tell it to rip out all the Word coding and just send plain text. For example,

MY NEW STORY -STRIP

However, browsers and word proc's have changed since then. It's safe to assume the code that runs EA's story formatting/submissions has not.

This is probably something that's going to have to be looked into, IE...sorry.