I just type in ASCII codes to get int'l characters... Alt-130 in the case of cause celebré. I don't think the BBS allows HTML character entities.

First, 130 isn't ASCII, as ASCII is a 7-bit character set. Second, using character 130 assumes that the viewer uses the same character set I do, which is a reasonable assumption in ASCII-land (anyone using an EBCDIC browser?), but not necessarily in ISO-8859-1-land. Third, Alt-130 is pretty tough to do in Solaris. (Actually, I can, in general, do it easier by typing <compose><e><'>, but Netscrape 7.0 doesn't understand that. I can do it in a xterm and copy and paste, but that's a pain, and sometimes doesn't work.) Fourth, I know that the BBS doesn't understand character entities, but there's no reason it shouldn't. ASCII is disabled because of potential security problems, but there's nothing you can do with character entities that could cause a security problem. My parenthesized statement was a paean (paean?) to the BBS gods to make them work.