I suspected, and have now confirmed by trying it, that you can make those characters go away by setting your web browser (probably somewhere under fonts) for a default character encoding of "UTF-8" instead of whatever individual regional setting it has now e.g. most likely "Western ISO-8859-1".

I've also noticed from experience with other web forums that if Mudcat were to set UTF-8 as standard we wouldn't have those much discussed problems with £, € and other symbols not showing properly for everyone. I notice this has been experimented with, but the relevant meta tags have been commented out, probably because it breaks too many existing postings that have already been done in ISO-8859-1. (try "view source" and search page for "utf-8" on any mudcat page and you'll see the codes hidden away there)

If Mudcat's coders could set UTF-8 for all NEW threads created, that mess would slowly become history. Not only that, but we'd be truly international, and we'll all be able to use musical symbols, Greek and Cyrillic text, Anglo Saxon Runes... anything supported by whatever fonts we have.