Weird characters in posts

[abozich]

Just recently, I've noticed that things like apostrophes are being converted to question marks when some users post them.

I've done a bit of research on this and it looks like it comes primarily when users post from an iOS device and have smart punctuation turned on.

And while I can instruct people to turn off smart punctuation as a bandaid, I am curious if there is a better way to address this. Do I need to change my character set to UTF-8? And if so, what does that entail?

I don't have any modifications at all on our forum or plugins.

[In Omnibus]

I think UTF-8 MB4 is the recommended character set.

Languages & Phrases -> Language Manager -> Edit... Put your character encoding in the space.

Settings -> Options -> Censorship Options. Remove the characters from the blank character stripper.

Edit your config.php and search for UTF-8. Uncomment this line, save the file and upload to your server.

Finally, you need to convert your entire database to UTF-8 if it isn't already.

[z3r0]

It was discussed here a while back - https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forum/vbulletin-4/vbulletin-4-questions-problems-and-troubleshooting/4367556-vb-4-2-2-add-support-for-emojis-written-on-ios-android

[abozich]

Thank you for sharing.