Studio Blog

Thank you all for letting us know about the issue regarding disappearing content. The specificity you have offered has been a tremendous help in narrowing down the cause. We are still working to solve the issue and in the meantime we have a few possible workaround solutions for submitting content.

The problem seems to be related to the rich text in Microsoft Word as well as some other word processing programs, such that copying and pasting from a Word document will cause an error in the system. Here are three temporary solutions, but as with any detour, you will unfortunately have to go a little out of your way. We are genuinely sorry for the hassle:

Option 1: Type your article manually into the submission page. If you are concerned about spell check, you can use Mozilla Firefox as your web browser which offers its own built-in spell checker. If you don’t have Firefox, you can download the browser for free in about two minutes. You can access it here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

Option 2: Write your article in Notepad which is another standard text program offered by Microsoft Office. You can safely copy and paste articles from Notepad into the submission page and you will have a backup of your work should anything go wrong.

Option 3: Write your article in a Word document, copy and paste the article into the body of an email and send it to yourself. You will need to select “Plain Text” in your email to ensure that your article is converted to plain text. Then you can copy and paste your article from the email into the submission page.

Please keep in mind that this is temporary and we are working hard to solve this problem as soon as possible. To ensure that your work is not lost, please choose the “Save and Preview” option before submitting for publication. If the article text appears then you can submit the article. Thank you all again for your help, and please email us at editorialteam@demandstudios.com if you continue to have problems.

UPDATE!! Please try the following:

If you are cutting and pasting from Word, please disable "smart quotes," the character that seems to be causing the problem.

Here's how:

1) In Word 2007, find the file menu (it's that circle with the interlinking shapes in the far top-left corner of your screen). Pull that menu down and select the "Word Options" button in the bottom right of that menu.

2) Under Word Options, select Proofing on the left. When that screen comes up, click the "AutoCorrect Options" button. Then, select the AutoFormat Tab.

3) In that Tab, uncheck the box under Replace that says, "Straight Quotes" with "Smart Quotes."

Those "curly" quotes used in Word are one of the characters we found that are causing this bug. When we find more, we will post about them, but please make sure only straight quotes are used when you submit articles.

Again, this is temporary - we want to get this problem completely fixed. Thanks for your patience!