At the risk of posing a question which has been answered a million times - I apologize - : What is wrong with the use of the quotation mark? Parts of the GOG site don't seem to allow the use of the quotation mark. See attachment. Does anyone know why?

Input sanitizing to prevent javascript attacks from what I recall. Not the cleanest way, but there was a lovely case of forum redirects a few years back.

What?! I thought it was the Nth bug, not some fugly workaround O_o

It is a bug. Completely messing up some characters isn't inherent to input sanitization. They're doing it wrong since forever. They are doing a lot of things wrong or just poorly on the site...

Funny thing: if you were to ask a typographer, they would say that that silly thing on your keyboard is an abomination. Opening and closing quotation marks should be different, and have been different for hundreds of years. The limitations of those nasty typewriters and computers — inferior technology for this purpose — made proper quotation marks less common, destroying little by little what took the typography world so long to accomplish.
Kerning, ligatures... bah! All that knowledge and experience they have built up is being ignored. Things are more difficult and less pleasant to read now.
Don't even mention "Comic Sans" near them.

Well, there's a reason all the typographers are unemployed now ;-)

Sorry, that was harsh. I do have a deep sympathy for anyone whose entire field of work is made redundant by new technology. Losing your job is never fun, least of all when there is little to no chance of finding another in your field.

That being said, it's a fact of the way text is handled by modern computer systems that you court disaster by using those "pretty" punctuation marks. As an integration specialist, I have seen too many systems either flat-out throw up or just garble the characters when people paste text into them from "pretty" text editors. It's bad enough that different systems use different encodings (which can have much the same result, especially when special characters are involved), but those special punctuation marks that MS Office in particular happily auto-replaces the standard ones with in anything you write in them (unless you explicitly switch that off in the settings), have a habit of causing havoc in any computer system they come into contact with, outside of their own file formats.

I asked one person who complained about this recently if they had done it the way you describe, and they said no, that they had simply composed their review in the pop-up window opened by the browser when you click "Add a review" (or whatever the button's called), with no copypasta involved.

Interestingly, the forum software can actually parse the "&[whatever]" junk that the review system just leaves as-is -- if you copy & paste one of the affected reviews into a forum post, it will (usually) auto-convert those back into intelligible characters. I'm guessing the main site is supposed to do this as well (after it converts the special characters into those "&tags" in the first place), but it doesn't.
...Of course, what I know about software & programming could fit in a hat with plenty of room still left for my head, so there's that to consider. :)

After further study of the phenomenon in question (the escaped quotation marks in reviews) I think I have to revise my assumption. While I still think it is caused (sort of) by the use of non-standard punctuation marks, I do believe it is actually a bug. It would appear that on its way to the database, a review passes through one more round of HTML escaping than it passes through rounds of unescaping on its way from the database back to the site. As a result, the right singlequote for instance looks like this in the page source: ’ (we'll see if the forum software garbles that).

Obviously, too much escaping is going on. Had it not been wrongly escaped, the page should be able to render the characters just fine.

Edit:
The forum software does garble it. Interestingly, when quoted, another level of unescaping takes place. I've adjusted the code above so it should show correctly when I hit "Post".

Just to test, here are the four characters wrongly rendered in the review example: ’ “ ” –

ASCII ampersand and quote characters are as standard as they get. Still, you see " and & in the reviews.

What are you talking about? Microsoft Notepad is the finest C and C++ compiler ever made. lol

I think it is the same problem we face in other areas, like photography, music composition, sound editing, journalism, cinema, game making and many other areas. Technology makes certain tasks easier to do, but the tools do not make "the artist". I mean, “the artist” (to employ proper quotes ;-)
I expect that new technology will continue to ease thing on the newbie (with auto-everything), but we will continue to see 90% trash (to go with Theodore Sturgeon's saying).

Regarding the “funny quotes”, since they are Unicode now, software has no excuse not to play ball with them. The problem is mostly due to those guys who think that “7 bits per character ought to be enough for anybody”. Good. We agree on that. Still, it does not look like GOG cares.

Yes... and no. Some systems need to transmit such unholy amounts of data that it really does make sense to use a character representation with as small a memory footprint as possible. I only recently learned that UTF-32 actually exists, although I cannot for the life of me figure out why anyone would need it, or why anyone would think using it for anything would be a good idea. Bigger is not always better.

Still, mostly problems with non-standard (or at least non-ASCII) characters arise due to errors in conversions between different encodings, and not because any of the encodings involved don't actually contain the characters in question.
Hehe, you went into a lot more detail than I did. Good explanation :-)

Edit:
Except that you ran into the escape/unescape bug in your post as well, just like I did in mine. You need an extra level of escaping in the actual text for the post to render correctly.

Thank you for pointing it out to me, and for providing your corrections.

Thank you all. I have learned a few things...