an excellent shoutbox, but need a little tweeking'

i got the german specialchars (like ö,ä,ü etc ) working by patching the mod_shoutbox.php... (on NON UTF-8 Pages!! )

edit line 172 - 178 to look like :
-----
function jal_special_chars ($s) {
$s = htmlentities( utf8_decode($s), ENT_COMPAT , _JAL_ISO );

// if ( strtolower ( _JAL_ISO ) != 'utf-8' )
// $s = utf8_decode ( $s );
return str_replace("---","−-−",$s);
}

----

next :
uncomment line 234 so that it looks like :
----
$jal_user_text = jal_special_chars(trim($jal_user_text));
----

and finally :
line 316 :
----
echo 'time ).'">'.stripslashes($url).' : '.convert_smilies(" ".stripslashes(html_entity_decode($r->text))).'
----

maybe just a dirty hack, but on my 4 joomla pages it worked....
havn't set up a pure utf-8 page yet, maybe it try next week