Weird characters (?) & uneditable posts

Have you tried:
– deactivating ALL plugins temporarily to see if this resolves the problem. If this works, re-activate them individually (one-by-one) to find the problematic plugin(s). If you can’t get into your admin dashboard, try deactivating via FTP or SFTP or whatever file management application your host provides. If applicable, also remember to deactivate any plugins in the mu-plugins folder. The easiest way is to rename that folder to mu-plugins-old.
– To rule out any theme-specific issue, try switching to the unedited default, core-bundled Theme (such as Twenty Twelve or Twenty Thirteen) for a moment using the WP dashboard. If you don’t have access to your admin area, you can switch to the default theme by renaming your current theme’s folder in wp-content/themes and adding “-old” to the end of the folder name using via FTP or SFTP or whatever file management application your host provides. Alternately, you can remove other themes except the default theme. That will force your site to use it.
– resetting the plugins folder by FTP or PhpMyAdmin. Sometimes, an apparently inactive plugin can still cause problems (because the hooks remain unless plugins completely removed or some plugins stick around in cached files. So by renaming the folder, you break them and force them inactive).

Thanks Tara.

Unfortunately, no, deactivating all the plugins didn’t help.

Switching theme to a different default didn’t help (nor did updating Twenty Thirteen and switching back to it).

Resetting the plugins folder didn’t help.

I guess I’ll see if there’s anything on the support forums of my hosts, NearlyFreeSpeech.

Any other ideas?

what theme are you using?

Twenty Thirteen.

– Twenty Thirteen does not have such problems to my knowledge.

– Have you discussed this with your webhost?

– Also, check the error logs on your server for a more specific error message. If you need help locating them, ask your hosting provider to help you with that.

– Also check this line in your wp_config.php and see what it contains:
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

You may try changing it to something like:
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ‘latin1_swedish_ci’);

– If all the above troubleshooting steps fail to resolve the issue, try manually re-uploading all files and folders EXCEPT the wp-config.php file and the /wp-content/ directory from a fresh download of WordPress. Make sure that you delete the old copies of files & folder before uploading the new ones. Read the Manual Update directions first!
– Always backup everything (including your database) before doing any actions, just in case.

Thanks Tara. Yes, I contacted my hosts’ support forums. Sort of helpful but not at all conclusive.

The error logs on my server don’t include anything relevant-looking; it doesn’t seem like it’s spewing an error in response to being asked to edit a post that confuses it. I think the only plausibly related bit (from several days ago, so I expect it’s a red herring) is this:

[Sun Dec 08 10:39:52 2013] [error] [client 172.17.0.141] Cache couldn’t make dir ‘./cache’., referer: (url of wp-admin)/themes.php?activated=true
[Sun Dec 08 10:39:53 2013] [error] [client 172.17.0.141] Cache unable to open file for writing: ./cache/05e1e45a843408773b36e78958f9ba5a, referer: (url of wp-admin)/themes.php?activated=true

There isn’t a DB_COLLATE line in my wp_config file, which I haven’t edited for a long time, nor. DB_CHARSET. Based on this, I’m guessing I probably shouldn’t just add them. I can’t think why it would ever have been anything but UTF-8 anyway…

If DB_CHARSET and DB_COLLATE do not exist in your wp-config.php file, DO NOT add either definition to your wp-config.php file unless you read and understand Converting Database Character Sets. Adding DB_CHARSET and DB_COLLATE to the wp-config.php file, for an existing blog, can cause major problems.

ask you webhost if specifying some specific DB_COLLATE will help.

For now, I’ve fixed it by the strange and convoluted route of copying the text for the posts from phpMyAdmin into the WP backend. For some of the posts I also had to use Notepad++ to remove characters it was interpreting as ?, but at least one just needed pasting to remove the misinterpreted characters.

I’ve asked in the NFS forum about DB_COLLATE, too. Thanks.

Glad you got it sorted ??