Putting spaces between paragraphs in the custom welcome PM

[Maltair]

Up until now, on vb the custom PM did not work (Bug report VBV-6296) but now does! on 5.2.2 Thanks!

1) I did a test registration of a new member, and received, instead of
Welcome to _______ [name of my forum} I got
Welcome to $vbphrase[welcomemail_gemailsubject] (or something like that).

Then when I went in to edit the PM Title I noticed that this phrase Welcome to $vbphrase[welcomemail_gemailsubject] (or something like that, I don't recall exactly) was in the English translation area. Is this a bug? because I never put it in like that.

I now changed it to
Welcome to {1}
and now okay.

---

Question: my welcome PM is a number of sentences long. As I view it in the PM Body, I see the spaces between paragraphs. But when received by the new member, it is just one long single paragraph. How do I space the paragraphs? (Put some spaces in between some sentences that are carried over as spaces in the final PM received.)

[Trevor Hannant]

It sounds like you had an old translation that was carried forward. If there's test in the translation textbox, then that's been added by yourself or another admin with access to the Phrase Manager at some point - installations/upgrades don't add any text to that field.

Can you paste the contents of your Welcome PM here

[Maltair]

Well when I look at my welcome PM in the control panel - the PM Body, I see it all with the proper formatting: spaces (lines) between the paragraphs, 8 separate paragraphs of one or two sentences each, but when the new registrant receives it, it is all plastered into one paragraph no spaces (lines) between any sentences. In other words formatting is lost as far as spaces between paragraphs, just becomes one continuous set of sentences. Even the Welcome to _____ is stuck into the top with no space after that line and the closing All the best, ____ is plastered all into the one paragraph too.

The welcome EMAIL is received with correct formatting.

[Maltair]

The answer was that html is needed to format the custom Welcome PM - needed to put
<br /><br />
between each line.

Odd how these <br /><br /> are needed to paginate/format the Welcome PM but not the custom Welcome Email. The Welcome Email comes through just fine with the spaces between the paragraphs without any <br /><br />.

[Mark.B]

The answer was that html is needed to format the custom Welcome PM - needed to put
<br /><br />
between each line.

Odd how these <br /><br /> are needed to paginate/format the Welcome PM but not the custom Welcome Email. The Welcome Email comes through just fine with the spaces between the paragraphs without any <br /><br />.

I would report this as a bug....post back with the bug link if you can.
Phrases should not require a knowledge of html. And indeed, in the case of email phrases, anyone viewing the mail in plain text will see the <br /> tags.

[Wayne Luke]

Email is sent as plain text not HTML.

Private Messages are sent as HTML. In HTML, the specification says that multiple spaces should be condensed to one space and carriage returns are ignored. Most browsers have followed these rules since the mid-1990s.

[Maltair]

Wayne, I realize that now (that the welcome PM comes in HTML), but it wasn't like that before (in vb3). Then again, custom welcome PM hasn't worked in vb5 until now anyway so I had no way of testing this.

[Wayne Luke]

Things have changed a lot over the last 10 years since vBulletin 3 was released.