Bank Of America's question thingy used to do this, but also included commas in its no-no list. Utterly infuriating.

Posted by: LafinJack at March 9, 2007 01:49 AM

Likely the result of an inexperienced programmer who doesn't know how to handle the escaping of special characters. In any case, it is inexcusable.

Posted by: Carlos Gomez at March 9, 2007 08:31 AM

Youd think that todays technology would allow for proper punctuation I think I would go crazy if I had to be the person who had to read all those questions without any question marks Id start to question myself on everyday punctuation and my friends and family would soon start to see a decline in my abilities to write a proper sentence Thanks TIB for letting us use question marks etc Sentences without definitive ends are harder to type

Posted by: lefty-chef at March 9, 2007 09:23 AM

At least they warn you in advance which characters aren't allowed. All too many sites let you type anything, then reject what you type because you used characters they didn't say you couldn't.

Posted by: Mike-76NYSV at March 9, 2007 10:47 AM

Equally as amusing as the inability to use a question mark in writing a question is being prohibited from using % when inquiring about mortgages.

Posted by: SwedishCanuck at March 9, 2007 11:16 AM

I've seen this approach, and I've also seen ticketing systems that simply filtered these "special characters" before sending the request on to the person to be processed. I'd see my submission in their reply and when they failed to understand what I was asking, it was usually obvious why because all of the (significant!) punctuation was stripped.

Carlos nailed it: the system was written by an incompetent developer that does not understand how to escape/encode data. He's probably dropping the text right into a SQL statement or something.

Posted by: Fastolfe at March 9, 2007 11:21 AM

I've gotta agree that this is pretty stupid, but at least they give you 3,000 characters to say what you need to say. I'll bet most of us have run into the forms with ridiculously small input limits which force you to leave out vital detail to simply be able to send anything.

Posted by: Erich at March 9, 2007 02:27 PM

>Mike:"At least they warn you in advance which characters aren't allowed. All too many sites let you type anything, then reject what you type because you used characters they didn't say you couldn't."

Too true...and what about sites that require a password, but won't accept "special characters" as part of that password, thus making their passwords less secure. They usually don't mention this, either, until you try a combination that they don't like.

Posted by: Erich at March 9, 2007 02:30 PM