It’s this activity list in the user profiles, that shows some crazy symbols.
Interesting. You are using the “right single quotation mark” as apostrophe (likely due to your limited smartphone keyboard) and discourse seems not to handle this well. I also see these weird characters (but not in the thread itself).
Now I wonder what character was actually meant to be behind the “etc” in the meta category’s description …
it actually was the unicode char for … 
tbh it looks more like a browser setting that overrides the encoding for websites to latin1 while discourse is probably sending UTF-8.
But: Why does it then not happen in the threads themselves? I tested 3 different browsers (2 times gecko-based, one times chromium-based) and it happens in all 3.
Do you have a browser without this issue?
i dont see it in any browser?
Looks like you’re onto something, Chris !!
I was using FireFox’s Developer ‘Inspect’ function and your message popped up, which I quickly screen-grabbed,n voila:
See all the funny chars. even in “your” pop-up?
My keyboard is a small one with no numeric pad at right. Therefore, I think you have put me on the right track. I have gotten used to seeing “â” instead of various characters … I usually know what was meant. Upper case vertical bar shows up a lot, too.
I will post anything earth-shattering that I come across …
what extensions are you using?
I tested here with various firefox and chromium based browser on linux and cant reproduce the issue. also if you are in the developer tools → network tab → and pick the html request/response you will see that the response header clearly says text/html; charset=utf-8 and the issue you see looks very much like either UTF-8 forced into a non utf-8 encoding.
just for giggles create a new firefox profile without any extensions and see if you can reproduce it with that.
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Can I just turn them off rather than creating a new profile, which I am reluctant to do?
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sure, the only things it wouldnt test is weird settings somewhere.
just did it: both single and double quotes still come up as a-circumflex.
testing copied someb text from notepad and pasted here
Test I’ll etc.! …
yeah and your unicode chars look all correct to me here.
Morning!
Today I copied some characters from Windows’ Character Map:
!'"&$
[edit] They showed up correct in Activity !! [/edit]
Now to entering quotes as Windows Alt-codes:
"
Rats!! Alt+21 (double-quote) apparently does nothing in the Editor until I look in Category Meta and it suddenly appears and also appears in the ‘my posts’ list selected from the menu next to my avatar at top right.
Another test from the keyboard after messing with the keyboard setting in Win 7 Control Panel.
I’m I’ll … “quote”
It appears to be fixed! Thank y’all for your help, gents!
I added a 4th browser for test, webkit-based safari on ios, and it shows the issue as well. So I tested 4 different browsers on 3 different OS (ubuntu linux, android, ios), 3 of them without any plugins or otherwise altered, just plain, fresh installs that came with the os.
Therefore I wonder if you are looking at the same pages where the rest of us can see the issue? From the main page, selecting “Categories”, then it is directly visible in the description of the “META” category.
i tested multiple browsers on linux and ios. none show the issue. is there any proxy or so involved?
I was struggling to get it to show but it did. Firefox on android but request the desktop view.
No, and I tested now in different networks (hotel wifi, three different mobile carriers, home wifi) and even in different countries (France and germany). The issue persists.
To get to the categories overview, I had to switch to desktop mode on ios. What I wonder now is, my company iphone is always up to date with the recent releases from apple (the company deactivates it if I do not upgrade in time). Therefore I cannot understand that it is showing something different on your side. I wonder which other settings could be involved. Maybe some language settings? But on 3 different devices now with 5 different browsers? How can it be that you cannot reproduce?
Note that we don’t make the forum software, so if you have a solid reproduction of this, you can report it upstream. No need for us to reproduce.