I'm seeing a lot of "â?¢A" style junk everywhere, there's a thread posted by "übermod", and I'm guessing the "ü" was supposed to be a U with an umlaut?  Is it some sort of problem my end, or is the forum mangling Unicode?

Both those mangled examples I gave have themselves been mangled...

It certainly happens for alt+149.

1

^ That was supposed to be a plus one, but the plus got lost.

Plus: + + +

The page is declared as UTF-8 but it might be actually processed as ascii.

It looks like it works when you actually type it in.

Obviously someone doesn't know the absolute minimum that every programmer should know about Unicode.

Oh, if only someone had written an article on it somewhere...

Ooh, Aaron, you sound knowledgable on the subject, why don't you give us some pointers? :-P

Sigh...we all know that if I could do pointers, I'd be world famous, touring with incessant speaking gigs.

Look at the August 30 -31 entries on this page, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/2005_08.html
where Bill Poser explains how this comes about.

The program he refers to for avoiding this problem is here http://billposer.org/Software/uni2ascii.html