I sometimes need to use Japanese Windows for certain tasks. Recently, during some idle time, I browsed the CastleCops site from Japanese Internet Explorer. I was a bit shocked to find the entire site sprinkled with garbage characters!

The cause was found easily: the CC site does not specify an explicit encoding anywhere. This causes browsers to choose a default encoding; when the browser is a Japanese one, then the default encoding will be 'Shift_JIS'. This will cause characters next to special characters (period, comma, apostrophes, etc.) to turn into random garbage characters, or even false Japanese characters.

Suggestion: SpamCop should specify its own encoding to allow users with non-European languages to successfully see the original CC content. Best choice: iso-8859-1 (Western European), or UTF-8 (Unicode).

Interesting... this was set in the past, must have disappeared when we went to Squid. Thanks for the heads up, I'll check into this.

I should note, it was set directly in the http header, and not in the content data.

I wouldn't know how to do that; I think the "normal" way is to supply it with a META tag. Thanks for checking into it.

Apache just took care of it, but with squid in the middle, things are different apparently.

I don't know if it's related or not, but I'm on an English OS (IE7, IE6, or Firefox) and noticed sometimes the "dots" that separate New Forum Posts, Send a PM, Your Topics, etc. up top in the navbar would turn up as Question Marks ...

Didn't see it as a big deal, and well, it was quite random (or probably because I used too many configurations around here; depending on what I'm doing...lol).

But yea, I can't remember off hand where it was displaying like that...whether it was Firefox 2.0.0.7 (It's showing the dots fine right now), Torpark/XeroBank Browser, or IE7, or IE6 (on campus).

Can you check what your default encoding is (View | Encoding). Does the question mark go away when you change your encoding to Western European or Unicode UTF-8 ? If yes, then this is related.

OK I've got it in the apache conf now.

Of particular note from the conf file:

#
# Specify a default charset for all pages sent out. This is
# always a good idea and opens the door for future internationalisation
# of your web site, should you ever want it. Specifying it as
# a default does little harm; as the standard dictates that a page
# is in iso-8859-1 (latin1) unless specified otherwise i.e. you
# are merely stating the obvious. There are also some security
# reasons in browsers, related to javascript and URL parsing
# which encourage you to always set a default char set.
#

I have just checked it under Japanese Windows, and everything looks fine. The browser has received the default encoding iso-8859-1, and it displays perfectly.

Thanks, Paul!