Hello people,

So, in reviews, I often see "&" cutting words in half, or surrounding words.

What is it supposed to be?

I'd assume & would be 'and'. So...

Black & white = Black and white

Though HTML uses it as an escape. So

& = &
' = &squot;
" = "

etc... so it could just be the sanitizing text->html function before it's saved to the database...

Better if you gave some examples...

It's GOG's messed-up code which mangles characters in comments with HTML.

What eric5h5 said. After the redesign from Oct 2018 they messed up the encoding and encoded characters aren't properly displayed anymore, so if & is encoded as & amp ; (without spaces), since Oct 2018 you see & amp ; (without spaces) instead of &, or if for example someone uses é in their text, it'll likely be encoded as & eacute ; (without spaces), so since then you'll see that instead of é and need to do your own... mental decoding.

On the forum, yes, it decodes encoded characters, but the forum wasn't changed, and the question was about reviews, which were changed.

This is something that happened when they ruined the site for the 10th Anniversary of GOG.

Some people, including myself, have been complaining about the issue since then. Yet they've never fixed it.

As of the 10th Anniversary, they retroactively ruined all already-published reviews by replacing the "&" characters inside of them with strange characters that the author did not actually write. Of course, this problem is compounded by the fact that GOG doesn't let users edit their own reviews (which is another basic feature that GOG desperately needs), so even the authors who are aware of how their reviews have been wrecked, cannot correct it themselves.

This issue became overshadowed by a sister-problem, which is, the 10th Anniversary ruination also, at the same time, retroactively removed all paragraph breaks out of every already-published review.

And these things also happened to new reviews that were made after the 10th Anniversary as well.

So most people complained about the paragraph break problem, as it was more obvious than the "&" problem, until eventually, over a year later, GOG finally fixed the paragraph break problem.

Then, there were many posts on this board saying things like, "The reviews have finally been fixed!," which caused the "& "problem to continue to be ignored, as the few posts like mine, which pointed out that it still has not been fixed, got drowned out by the many other posts that were happy that the paragraph breaks were finally fixed, and thus sent the incorrect message that nothing more needed to be done by GOG in order to fix the reviews.

So I wouldn't be surprised if GOG never fixes this "&" problem, and especially not if most users continue never to complain about it, and pretend like everything is fine with the reviews now, even though everything is not fine.