Some forum searches are giving the � character in the results, this seems to be in place of accents or other special characters. For instance, a forum search for 'Regalo' brings up 7 results in a single thread, where the thread title, which ends with an ellipsis (…) instead shows the � character, and the second result shows S� instead of Sì
ETA: same with Débâcle (shows d�b�cle in results)
The same thing shows up in the story Quick Search - e.g., try searching for deja vu
I've already addressed this issue.
The reason for this is our outdated text search engine.
Back in the early 2000s, I started using MySQL for text search, but it became slow as more stories were added to the site. In 2006-2007, I switched to Sphinxsearch, but it had some issues with UTF-8 support.
However, the Sphinxsearch project died in 2014, and I didn't know about it until 2019, 2020, or so. Since it was working reasonably well, I put replacing it on the back burner.
I started working on a replacement, which is manticoresearch, a while back, but there are many places where this needs to be updated, and the code is quite different from what I've done so far, so I haven't even gotten 20% done.
But eventually, it will be resolved.
Since Sphinxsearch is used for story text search and forum posts search, until I finish the move, those pesky black characters will keep showing up wherever a higher UTF-8 character should be.