Interesting. I really think it’s 1252 somewhere, but your commentary also makes some sense. It could be some interaction between the markup translation, detranslation to raw characters, and retranslation to viewable.
The bit I find particularly interesting is that the smart quotes work on the front page, but break on the thread view.
Here’s my dump from copying smart quotes to a file (in a UTF-8 console) and hexdumping it:
[redacted]-imac:~ [redacted]$ hexdump ~/freep.txt
0000000 c3 a2 e2 82 ac 0a
0000006
That looks very much like the issue referenced on stackoverflow, which is why I suspect 1252 in there somewhere.
Anything in the chain that conflicts with that, such as Windoze-1252 or ISO-8859-1 or Latin-1, can be expected to cause problems.
This is a recent problem. It started around the time FR was having problems getting banned by Google's malware filter, apparently due to an FR page that linked to a malware sit. I would think the debugging process would start with the age-old question, What did I change last?
UTF-8 rules! The web should be UTF-8 end to end!
I sometimes get a google warning when I click on threads, but never on the front page. I very frequently get the warning when I click on links to individual posts.
This started at about the same time as the smart quote problem. I assume they are caused by the same glitch?