[Question] What's with the question marks?

[neatoman]

I've noticed recently that a lot users (myself not included) aren't able write in some symbols. Instead there's just a question mark in place. What is causing this?

[JonesyKitty]

Originally Posted by neatoman

I've noticed recently that a lot users (myself not included) aren't able write in some symbols. Instead there's just a question mark in place. What is causing this?

I've noticed this on other sites and even text messages. I was wondering the same thing.

[newfan]

I've noticed it isn't just new posts either, an older thread now has symbols in it's title instead of what it was originally.

[Papenbrook]

It's a time rift.

..., But seriously, I don't know.

[The Turtle Terminator]

Glad I wasn't the only person who noticed this. Doesn't show up on desktops, but does on my phone

[frank_one]

My guess is someone has messed with the character table of the forum, stuff like unicode or UTF-8. Maybe they updated something on vBulletin or a setting of the server that hosts the board.
At first I thought it was because I'm a Linux user but then I noticed it's the same on other systems.

[Whatswiththeheadbands?]

That's not the only fault. I'm now getting ?€œ instead of apostrophes

[Shark_Blade]

5 months already with no changes lol

looks like this is gonna be a permanent feature.

[IndigoErth]

Originally Posted by The Turtle Terminator

Doesn't show up on desktops, but does on my phone

I've had it happen once recently.

Had figured it was phone related (I don't post with one), and maybe it was just a fluke, but it did it to a recent copy/post of an Instagram quote via my desktop.

Though Instagram is most heavily used via phone, right? So maybe still something coming from the phone side of the post I'd copied, not from my end? I've not had any issues with anything I've written here myself.

Could it be a font that's bugged out or not translating?

[Andrew NDB]

It just seems to be people's posts who are making commas the fancy way, like out of Word.

[Diorm]

Just look at the name of the location I leave! I never changed it since I'm here.

[IndigoErth]

Originally Posted by Diorm

Just look at the name of the location I leave! I never changed it since I'm here.

That is strange. Well if it changed something already existing...I'm out of guesses.

[Krang]

Originally Posted by frank_one

My guess is someone has messed with the character table of the forum, stuff like unicode or UTF-8. Maybe they updated something on vBulletin or a setting of the server that hosts the board.
At first I thought it was because I'm a Linux user but then I noticed it's the same on other systems.

Yes, this was the cause of the problem. It looks like somewhere along the way, our host made an upgrade to our database software that automatically switched everything to UTF-8. I changed the forum settings to use UTF-8 as well, which should cause apostrophes, quotation marks, etc. to work correctly now in all posts moving forward.

Unfortunately, all previous posts that have question marks in them will continue to have them, because they were saved in the database that way and can't be recovered. At some point, I can try to correct them in the database, but it won't be 100% perfect.

Also, if you notice this change breaking anything else, please reply here.

[frank_one]

Thank you for the explanation