Unusual symbols in posts

[Todd j]

Wondering why I see unusual symbols in my posts that I do not use.  Some characters are being substituted without my knowing how. Any thoughts?  Am I the only one experiencing this?  Check out the title of my build thread center of the pic.  BTW I feel like this thread should be in the other forum.  I should?ve started it In The build forum.  Please use your discretion and move if you prefer. 

[Brian.Dixon]

I think the strange symbols are characters which  can't be displayed ... or stored in the database.  Of course the original characters CAN be, but there's a setting (and I forget what it's called) on databases to tell them what character set to support.  There may be something similar in the forums software.  My 'signature' is an example ... it's supposed to look like fish swimming up and down, but lately, I've noticed that some SMF forums (the software that we use) have stopped displaying them and now display gibberish. So ... long story short, I'm aware of the issue but haven't had time to look into it yet...

[Todd j]

Hmmmm.  Sounds kinda like a pain.  Thx for the explanation

[Brian.Dixon]

Hmmmm.  Sounds kinda like a pain.  Thx for the explanation

Yeah, not sure why, but I've seen the same thing happen on other forums.  I suspect a MySQL update on the ISP servers since I/we haven't changed anything and the same goes for other sites that have similar issues going on, e.g. they hadn't changed anything either.  It's the database DB_LOCALE setting that determines how unicode and other characters are interpreted and displayed.  I think a different default got pushed out ...

Might be worth a ticket at the ISP ....


Brian