Care and feeding of the red "500 Internal Server Error"

Why can't I post?

What is that? Why does the HQ hate me! Why does my phone hate the HQ? Why is that part of the couch so sticky? Why is that ewok looking at me like that? Whose pants are these, even?

Getting your first red "500 Internal Server Error" can be confusing and scary, but it's a normal, healthy, beautiful part of any growing young Moron or 'ette's life. What causes it? Boring internet things! How can you fix it? It's easier than you think!

Without getting into too much detail, you get the error when you try to post a bizarre, non-standard character that Minx 0.7 alpha doesn't understand how to deal with, such as basic everyday punctuation. In this case, the error is waaaaaay the balls down at the bottom of the stacktrace (exceptions "bubble up" from the bottom in a stacktrace like Gilbey's and Ensure in a Hillary):

UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character u'\u2091'...

In short, that means that ' is comforting and ’ is outré and terrifying, so Minx convulsively shits the bed instead of quietly converting from one to the other or telling you what's wrong.

But I'm not even typing an apostrophe!

iOS is doing it for you. When "smart punctuation" is enabled - and it often is by default and sometimes after an update - apostrophe's are added to word's that require them, and are corrected to s'mart apo'strophe's automatically. So just trying to post "Why can't I post" gets converted to "Why can’t I post", and there you go. It's technically iOS' fault, but it's really just trying to make you look refined and urbane by using commonly-accepted, near-universally-supported typography.

So how do I fix it?

Just follow the instructions and you'll be fine!

Then, go to "General". Be sure to ask an adult if you need help!

Now, just disable "Smart Punctuation". Tada! Now everything is beautiful, and nothing hurts.

OK, but WHY can't I post?

"u2019" (8217 in decimal, ’ if you're feeling saucy) is the Unicode character for "right single quotation mark". "Unicode" is the "street name" for a dangerous, experimental, highly illegal character encoding used by virtually every piece of your primitive Earth software except for Minx 0.7 alpha. Prudently, Minx does not support this new and unproven encoding, to which "right single quotation mark" was only added in Unicode version 1.1.0 just last June of 1993 (#1 song: "That's the Way Love Goes" by Janet Jackson).

To be fair, Python, the language used for Minx, is a little twitchy about Unicode sometimes, as is the database that holds all the comments and metadata (MySQL). Lots of sites run on Python and MySQL though, and they do just fine with Unicode; dealing with it is rather a solved problem because it is an invaluable and nigh-universally adopted scheme for encoding characters in nearly any language on the planet and some that aren't. Twenty years ago (#1 song: "The Boy Is Mine" by Brandy & Monica), it would be perfectly reasonable to have a bit of trouble storing and parsing Unicode input on the Internet.

In TYOOL 2021*, if a Toad Holler Community College freshman turned in a commenting engine for an introductory web applications course, and posting a Unicode right single quotation mark dumped a raw cryptic Python stacktrace to the browser without even trying to catch the exception, I would fail him so fucking hard his entire posterity unto the ending of time would be digging ditches in Siberia.

* (#1 song: "We Are All Being Murdered in this Grim Dystopian Future Hellscape" by SJWBot 0xF84D7091 feat. DJ Enormous Pulsating Brain)