Currently any Unicode one enters e.g. ? (<- actually an unicode ohm symbol) gets mangled to ? (<- actually a question mark) as soon as the post is submitted. This is a common pattern when the application thinks it's working with Unicode, but the database stores text as latin1 or some other obsolete encoding and removes all the unicode.
Actually Umlauts (öäüß) work fine, probably because they are part of latin1. The same goes for e.g. ±, ®, ©, ™, ¹, ², ³, ¼, ½, ?
There should (should - the SMF docs are ... not good...) be a couple options related to page size:
- Topic Settings / Maximum messages to display in a topic page <- I guess this is the one we are looking for
- Topic Settings / Number of posts per page in a topic page <- And this is probably what changed the default for everyone
- Topic Settings / Max number of replies in a topic to show "All" posts <- "Set this to the maximum number of posts a topic can have to show the all link. Setting this lower than "Maximum messages to display in a topic page" will simply mean it never gets shown, and setting it too high could slow down your forum." ... I guess setting this high enough enables a view where the entire topic is on one page or something like that.