When reading trip reports, there is frequently a black diamond shape with a "?" inside where a punctuation mark or symbol should obviously be. For some reason, this bugs me wondering - is it because the trip report was written in a different format and the site can't recognize the characters or symbols ? Inquiring minds want to know ...thanks.

Generally that means that there was a character set mismatch between the original format (sent by the trip report writer) and some stage in our publishing process. You'll see it most often in accented characters such as those used in French- or Spanish-derived words.

Thanks, Andrew !

There've been times where I got "incorrect" punctuation (though not a diamond/question mark combination) and it was because my "Encoding" Setting wasn't set to Western European (Windows) -- in IE 6.0 this is under View - Encoding.