Because of a new quirk in Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP SP2, we were forced to change the site's default character set from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8. This will affect the look of articles, profiles and events that have special characters such as unlauts, em dashes and smart quotes. Members who have copied and pasted their articles directly from other web pages and/or text editors are more likely to have had this problem than members who typed their articles in directly.

To fix errant symbols in articles, simply edit those symbols by typing over them or re-pasting the content into the article/profile containing them. To do so, authors must log in to their accounts and click "Modify Account" (to fix profiles) or go to an article and click "Edit Article" (to fix articles).

For more information on the bug that forced this change, read Internet Explorer 6 problem with special characters.

Note To Members After making the change, we sent out a member update--but we had neglected to update the same encoding on outgoing emails. So the member update sent on May 16, 2005 contains erroneous characters. Please forgive.