How to include Dexcom's "︖︖︖" status in a topic title

OK, so I realize I am one the few (only?) people who might actually care about this, but that’s just part of what gives me my undeniable charm, no? :slightly_smiling:

A while back I noticed that someone had posted a topic with the title
 Anyone else having ? on Dexcom G4 receiver + pump?

Upon reading I realized that the topic title was apparently meant to be
 Anyone else having ??? on Dexcom G4 receiver + pump?
but for some reason, the Discourse platform was converting the 3 question marks ??? in the title into a single question mark, ‘?’.

This sort of thing bothers me, so I dug into it by posting about it to meta.discourse.org (link below).
Unable to edit topic title to change “?” into “?” (3 question marks in a row)

The answer, not surprisingly (to me), was that this is not a bug, but a feature. Discourse apparently has a “title prettify” setting in its admin/settings which removes the extra question mark. So, one rather “ham-handed” (IMO) way around this would be to change this setting.

Another way … and better in my opinion … is to just use an alternate Unicode character for ? such as perhaps ︖ or �. Yet another work-around is to use ? ? ?, where blanks have been inserted between the question marks.

So, alrighty then! Problem “solved” (kinda, sorta). :relieved:

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Be happy you don’t have an apostrophe in your last name. I do and every database handles it differently. Some replace it with a space, which makes the first letter of my last name look like a middle initial. Some databases handle it OK and easily accept and display it. A third iteration is the removal of the apostrophe and placing all the letters as a single block. My name is spelled with upper case letters for the first two letters and lower case thereafter. It just looks rude to me to see how they mangle my name.

I guess this came about when early programming languages used the apostrophe as a “reserved” character that had meaning within the software and it took a lot of extra programming to allow the apostrophe to simply be displayed as a character like any other.

Where this comes into play is any list that is stored on a computer, like a flight reservation. I am forever talking with people who don’t understand the problem and most don’t even know what the word “apostrophe” looks like. “Is that like a comma?”

Doctor’s offices, insurance claims, Social Security, and Medicare all handle this differently. When I call in and identify myself, I often hear, “I’m sorry Mr. X’Xxxxxx, your file is not coming up. Are you sure you’re a member?”

Silly tangent rant, I know! :wink:

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irrational_John, you are undeniably charming, whether you care about being able to post three question marks in succession or not!

My suggestion as a way to get around this? Instead of “???”, use “? X 3”. Kind of like some medical shorthand I learned back in the day when I was in medical school. For example, a quadruple heart bypass is a “CABG x 4” which stands for “coronary artery bypass graft 4 times” and is pronounced “cabbage times four.” For a woman who has had multiple Caesarian sections, say 3 of them, we’d say “C-S x 3” for 3 C-sections. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out the meaning of the “designer” license plate of an immature new graduate from med school:
HD QID

And Terry4, you’ve found something for me to be grateful for during what has turned out to be a Tuesday fraught with multiple mines and fires in need of being put out: the fact that neither my first or last names contain an apostrophe.