I'm using;

For the Body Template.

I should point out that's not just feeds I having this issue with. Since I changed the HTML Character Set to UTF-8 from ISO-8859-1 it is also effecting usernames that contain a ?

See - http://www.forum.norml.ie/member.php?11

The username should be Ois?n Mac Giolla Bhr?de but it is being displayed as Ois�n Mac Giolla Bhr�de

OK, well, the only problem I saw in that feed is "It& # 39;s" that's supposed to be "It's". But when I look at the feed xml I see this:
An if you imagine decoding the characters, the &lt;b&gt;hemp&lt;/b&gt; later in the line becomes <b>hemp</b>, which correctly makes the word hemp bold in the post. But if you decode It&amp;#39;s you get It& # 39;s, which is what you see in the post. So it seems to me it's a problem in the feed, and I don't really see a solution to it (well, except maybe if you hacked the code to decode the post twice, but I'm not sure that wouldn't cause other issues).

Edit: BTW, I added some spaces in the above to prevent the codes from being interpreted.

I was able to fix the apostrophe issue with a replacement variable - https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2015/02/16.jpg

I don't mind the bold words so much. It's the ? & ? characters being displayed as boxes that I'd like to sort out.

Oh, OK, sorry. I remember seeing something earlier about replacement variables but I didn't pay enough attention.

I looked in to the other issue a little when you posted on vbulletin.com and I found that the feed seemed to be an ISO-8859-1 encoded document, with an xml tag that said it was UTF-8, and I think the rss feed poster code wasn't prepared to handle that. I would look in to it more but I didn't see those chars in the feed I was looking at.

Try changing this in your config.php file and uncomment this line.

so it looks like:

ozzy47, kh99 & Lynne thank you very much for your help with this issue.

I'm not sure why but for the last 4/5 days everything seems to be running smoothly. Maybe the database took a day or two to recognise the that the tables were changed to utf8_general_ci. So feeds are good.

The characters in the usernames were ok after I edited them from the box to the correct character.

Thanks again :)

Well glad to hear all is well now. :)