Why are there diamonds with ? marks in them in random posts??

Lately (past week or so?) odd diamonds with question marks have been showing up in peoples' posts. It looks like some kind of symbol, but when reading the posts, it doesn't look like it was intended (like other smileys or whatever). Is there a setting to get rid of them? There are some posts that have them at the end of every sentence! It's quite distracting!

Thanks!

Yes! I found this today as well.  There are wierd little (;p',) going on in posts that I have made..Its where I have made a "space" usually.

Very odd 

I'm so glad it's not just me! lol

Mmm. Probably to do with the software upgrades and special characters. I'll see what I can do, but can you point me to an example thread that has one?

Leah, it's happened to me when I've put the pound sign in a post, and when I tried to use the French accent grave over the e in seance.  It just makes a really black mark on the post instead of the intended character, but when it happened, I just went back and modified my posts when it did that - taking out the special characters.  I think it might have happened in using one of the smileys as well, but I can't remember exactly what happened, which one, etc.

For me it's an empty box.  Plumits Daughter's posts are full of them.  There's even a user name that has it at the end (George something or Mr. George something).

ETA:  These are examples:

http://talk.uk-yankee.com/index.php?topic=50219.msg713672#msg713672  looks like this to me. http://talk.uk-yankee.com/index.php?topic=49998.msg713422#msg713422 becomes this.  Odd thing is the orginal post doesn't have boxes in it until Plumits Daughter quoted it.

For me it's an empty box.  Plumits Daughter's posts are full of them.  There's even a user name that has it at the end (George something or Mr. George something).

Trust it to be mine! 

Perhaps possibly when I spell check things.  I notice it more in posts where I have run a quick check ?

I'm getting the nbsp's.

Trust it to be mine!� 

Perhaps possibly when I spell check things.�  I notice it more in posts where I have run a quick check ?

Maybe.  I am not blaming you, that's for sure.  Your posts were the first I noticed them in, and somehow they appear when you quote others' posts, even if they weren't in the originals (see my second example).

BTW, Leah, this started for me over the weekend.

ETA:  I now just looked at my first thread in this page and it has them in it for me.  Definitely weird. 

Maybe.¦nbsp; I am not blaming you, that's for sure.¦nbsp; Your posts were the first I noticed them in, and somehow they appear when you quote others' posts, even if they weren't in the originals (see my second example).

ROFL! 

It's happened to my one of my posts here http://talk.uk-yankee.com/index.php?topic=49998.285

I thought maybe it was caused by excessive pressing of the little red minus button 

Yep, I see them now. I'm sure it's the server upgrades we did over the weekend, I'm sure there's a solution but it might take me a few days to find and fix it.

Oddly, they are showing up in some posts and on others' who've quoted some posts it's the nbpb thing! *odd*!!!!!

Thanks for looking into it, Leah!

It is usally what get's displayed when you don't have the appropriate font to display the character.  The pages are coming across at UTF-8 and when I manually change the encoding on the page, they show up as multiple garbage letters, so they appear to be MBCS encoding.  Somehow I suspect someone has gotten a mismatch between the encoding of SMF BBS application and the encoding in whatever your backend database is (MySQL?)

We had an upgrade to Apache2 and PHP5 from previous versions, I'm sure the UTF-8 is getting lost in there somewhere, alternatively the data in the database might just need converted to UTF-8. I just want to investigate the exact cause before I go fiddling because I don't want to make it worse or have to do more conversions than necessary. The database is mahussive so converting will also be time consuming, I only want to have to do it once. (avoiding more hours of downtime)

In normal forum viewing mode, in Firefox I see box shaped glyphs with FF above FD. In IE8 I see empty boxes.

Firefox 3.0.5:



IE 8 beta 2:



When I am posting a reply, in the previous posts below the typing box I see empty boxes in those places.

Both browsers (Reply mode)



I have a theory, based on what I have seen on other forums, that the people whose posts have funny symbols in, are using Macintoshes? I seem to hear the word "unicode" whispering in my head...