@widgetdealer wrote:
I use NM\M to describe item conditions. However, when I search for ITEMNAME NM my auctions do not appear in search results. When I search for ITEMNAME NM\M my auction appears with NMM in the title. This issue causes the keyword "NM" to not display in search results. Other sellers are using NM/M, NM-M, etc. and these are correctly being picked up in search results and displaying.
Right. So why are you using backslashes instead of forward slashes?
One possible reason for the backslashes to be disappearing on you is that the backslash is often used as an "escape character" in computer coding, especially for text strings, signifying that the letter following the backslash should be interpreted as a machine command and not just a regular letter in text.
For example, a backslash followed by an "n" ("\n") in many coding languages is used to represent a newline character, so that text following it should start a new line, not continue on the current one. In cases where you need to actually print the backslash as a character in text, you usually need to put two in a row ("\\").
So anyway, getting back to the main point, you have now verified that using a backslash in text may cause it to disappear, plus it's apparently not used as a separator (the forward slash is used as a separator), and people are not going to be searching on that anyway, so I would just leave it out, and go with the forward slash instead.
