*QUICK FIX TO RESTORING SCRAMBLED STORIES*
Those of you browsing stories and keeping up to date with forum news (via the Headline section) are no doubt already aware that roughly half the active stories on the site have been mangled by encoding errors during the recent board move.
This can prove especially discouraging to authors (like myself) who were in the midst of publishing large, in-progress stories, only to find that all previously posted chapters of said tales have been garbled and made virtually unreadable. Example:
“Alright. I’ll be a bit nicer than usual ‘cause you’re cute.†he started, grabbing Sammy’s little dome by the hair even though the twink’s head was heavily strapped down and completely immobilised. “We’ll take that gag out, but you better stay fuckin’ quiet and open up for whatever alternative we decide to shove in there. If you so much as make a peep or give us any fuckin’ trouble, I swear I’ll shove that thing back down your throat and you’ll be stuck choking on it ‘till tomorrow.†he warned, pointing a large index finger down at my stepbrother’s frozen face.
If you are one of the affected authors, keep reading. In this thread, I will share simple step-by-step instructions on how to very quickly and successfully unscramble a long and badly mangled chapter. Unless you have a lot of time on your hands or only a few stories to restore, I suggest leaving your finished works as is until a board-wide fix can be implemented.
*STEP-BY-STEP INSTRUCTIONS*
1. Create an account or log in to ChatGPT.
2. Log in to the forum, open the story you want to unscramble, select the desired chapter and click on the crayon icon to edit. You will want to copy everything in the text box (along with all of the BBcodes) so that it can be restored to its original form.
3. Go on ChatGPT, instruct it to "Correct the encoding errors in this text, but keep the writing and BBcodes intact." and then paste the garbled chapter just a couple of lines below the above-mentioned command.
4. ChatGPT will immediately recognise the encoding errors and restore the text back to its original/proper form. If you followed step 2 to the letter, it will also preserve all the BBcodes, meaning that bold or italic font will still appear as such if you originally used them.
5. Replace your corrupted chapter with ChatGPT's corrected version. Rinse and repeat for all following chapters you wish to restore. The process of restoring a chapter back to its original form takes roughly about a minute.
ADDITIONAL SPECIFICATIONS: If you input a sexually explicit text into ChatGPT, it may give you a bit of an attitude and put up some resistance. Feel free to kindly inform it that you are not interested in input and reiterate the original command: Correct the encoding errors in this text, but keep the writing and BBcodes intact."
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Hopefully, this will be of help to several of you.
Special thanks to @Subboi and @socjuc for the idea and assistance in restoring one of my active works.
