Lichess no longer allows the use of the upside down E in profile biography (but it used to)

About a year ago, I wrote my profile biography which included the letter Schwa (upside down E, used mainly in the Azerbaijani language, and in the International Phonetic Alphabet, among a few other languages). No problems, it saved. It is still currently showing on my public profile.

Now I went back and I wanted to change something completely different: my hometown. I did not touch my biography, but it will not let me save the changes I'm making to my hometown. The reason:

"The text contains invalid chars: e" (but instead of an 'e' it's a schwa, the upside down 'e'. I can't type out the letter in this forum post)

If it's invalid, why is it currently showing on my profile? This means I need to remove it from my bio in order to change something unrelated?

Hoping this will be fixed. It's very odd that this letter which is used in a few languages is no longer "supported", which I think it probably is supported because it's currently on my public biography.

I'd send a link to the wikipedia page to show what the letter looks like, but unfortunately that website link has the letter in it, so lichess won't let me post that link.

Thank you.

is that the same symbol as "there exist" in set notation? there should a unicode.

it would be nice to have a map of forbidden unicode per text feature across lichess (blog, inbox, forum, profile, team texts pages, etc...)

and if some basic set notation were allowed everywhere, oh, what a joy that would be.....

@dboing said in #3:
> is that the same symbol as "there exist" in set notation? there should a unicode.

It is not, that would be a mirrored uppercase E. The one I'm talking about is the lowercase 'e' turned 180 degrees (the uppercase version of it is just a large version of lowercase 'e' upside down)

Not even sure if the devs at lichess will care about this issue, but it's just very weird that it exists. Why is it unsupported when it's literally right there on my bio? lol

That char will be allowed after the next lichess update, in a few days from now.

@the-postminimalist said in #1:
> I'd send a link to the wikipedia page to show what the letter looks like, but unfortunately that website link has the letter in it, so lichess won't let me post that link.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa

@grasputin said in #6:
> en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa

Lmao right yes that page exists. That's for the linguistics use. I was thinking about the page for the character itself, which instead of being named "schwa" is just the letter itself. Which, it turns out I can paste it here because the URL doesn't have that symbol:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C6%8F

thibault said in #5:
> That char will be allowed after the next lichess update, in a few days from now.

@ChessVip11 had the same complaint several months ago. Hopefully, he will see this.

I have some long “s”es in my profile blurb — a quote from Shakespeare’s first folio, where he uses the word stockfish — but you can’t type those here anymore. For that reason, I fear to edit my profile, lest it lose something. :-/

I’m really not sure why we’re restricting any characters; Unicode is called Unicode for a reason. As I said here recently lichess.org/forum/off-topic-discussion/ip-xiv-crabs-are-lousy-dancers-because-they-have-four-left-feet?page=3#29, this forum is quite limited compared to most on the Internet; we can’t even use emoji, and those are nigh ubiquitous. (I mean you can even use them in YouTube comments.) We were once able to, though, so it really feels as if our interface has de-evolved somewhat. (Thank goodness the change wasn’t retroactive!)

Can someone remind me why we’re restricting our support for extended characters, rather than expanding it? Because, respectfully, I would argue that the future leads in one direction, and we are swimming against the current. It won’t be long before people are like, “Oh yeah, Lichess. Man, that site’s forum is Mediæval.” (Except that, in Mediæval times, they actually had fancier text than we do now.) ;-)

At least, in the blog post editor, we can use bold & italic text, etc. It would be nice if this composition form were more like that one . . . but I guess beggars can’t be choosers. (Although I gave half my sandwich to a homeless person once, and he pulled the lettuce out and threw it away.) ̄\_(ツ)_/ ̄

it use to be that you could deface a text page with some unicode I don't remember exactly how, but those characters would expand vertically beyond the lines where were in, because not following line alphabetic languages I think..

perhaps there are restrictions against that being too coarse and affecting other alphabetical languages as well.