I recently upgraded to the latest WordPress. That in itself is a long story. For some reason, the automatic upgrade didn’t work and I had to manually upgrade. I got that done but I noticed my posts were showing weird characters like  or †or or ?. I looked it up and apparently it is a problem with character encoding. The first solution I saw is a little bit unsatisfactory so I searched some more and found the ultimate solution. I followed the instructions and, voila!, no more weird characters.