Even though I am a foreigner currently residing in Poland I have to ensure that my users have a fully-functional bulletin board with all options available to them. I cannot change their language, though changing the encoding to the Unicode standard is fine with me as long as somone can "hold me by the hand" and lead me through the process.

Should be no harder than clicking update and having it go through all of your posts to update posted encodings.
And I agree, Rick is the man
