Why can't I read Chinese characters on this site!

I’m sure this has been addressed elsewhere but I’ve searched and can’t seem to find why it is that Chinese characters are appearing as numbers or just plain gobbledy gook.

I remember seeing some reference in another thread about settings and the like but why is it so difficult for a Taiwan based chat arena to display Chinese? BTW, my home PC has a Chinese operating system which usually allows the display of characters in any format.

Having Chinese characters at hand is the only way around the screwed up pinyin throughout the place (ok, it is improving in Taipei at least).

I still get a good laugh at the tale of a mate of mine who on having just arrived offered several taxi drivers an address written in English for a hostel on Pateh road. Cause they couldn’t read the English so he gladly pronounced it in as many variations as he could - “yes, that’s it, Pate…as in foix de gras” - all to no avail.

While I’m on my high horse. I note that there’s alot of duplicated queries (probably this one included). Could this not be simply resolved thru an external links page (or have I over looked that too! - in which case am I the goose or is it possible the site is difficult to navigate)

I do realise the mods are volunteers and I haven’t paid a bean, but…

HG

I’m not sure either. The old Oriented site appeared to handle Chinese just fine, but the new system (phpBB) seems to be schizophrenic when both Big5 and Unicode are enabled on the same browser. You can post Big5, but it reads Unicode back at you. And you can post Unicode, but you get garbage back when you read your post.