non-standard symbols showing up as "?"

I'm trying to display text symbols such as hearts, clubs, spades, diamonds and other symbols (not webdings font) in posts. The preview works fine, but the post replaces these symbols with "?".

For example, the effect I'm after:

http://www.gamingforce.org/forums/br...tml#post770359

The actual display:

http://www.gamingforce.org/forums/br...tml#post789392

Perhaps vB needs text symbol support?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I don't know about that, isn't it based on your font? GFF uses Verdana as the main font.

Testing: ????

EDIT:
Okay, it works in Preview, but it doesn't work after it's been posted. My guess is the database tables being used by GFF only use ANSI, and not Unicode encoding. I've done this for an SMF installation, but I'm not sure how easy it is to convert for VBulletin. Who knows what things will break.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Yeah this works fine in the "preview" of posts and journal posts. When I publish the text, any symbol with a diacritic (including the french and scandinavian letters) will become a question mark.

It worked in the spring, I'm quite sure of that.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Put Balls

Yeah this works fine in the "preview" of posts and journal posts. When I publish the text, any symbol with a diacritic (including the french and scandinavian letters) will become a question mark.

It worked in the spring, I'm quite sure of that.

That suggests it worked before the most recent transfer Balh did...maybe there's a difference.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Just dropping a note here that I have seen this and I am kind of working on it. No ETA, though.

This one will like everything else probably boil down to some combination of (1) fuck MySQL, (2) fuck PHP, and (3) fuck vBulletin.

I was speaking idiomatically.