Russ Allbery writes:
In fact, they're a huge distraction and waste of time and effort for
the few people who are developing *for Usenet* to have to re-solve
problems already being addressed by other protocols.
Right. That's why you should use the existing general-purpose solutions:
Unicode as a character set and UTF-8 as a character encoding.
There are some other protocols that are faced with buggy software---for
example, Sendmail destroying bytes 128 through 159---and that have made
the mistake of developing ad-hoc workarounds rather than demanding that
the bugs be fixed. There's no reason for USENET to make that mistake.
---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago