why cant you put pound sign as symbol up in chat?
I think the answer to that is Matt didn't programme the software to do that. I dare say if I'm wrong he'll put me right but if you really want to know best way to find out is contact Matt via the homepage, he doesn't always read the forum topics.
Is this something that's never worked, or has it just stopped working in the past few days?
The basic characters that PCs use are ASCII characters, there are 96 of them and they don't include the "£" symbol. Anything other than those 96 is from some kind of extended character set (Eg. UTF-8, ISO-8859, etc.). The problem at the weekend was related to extended character sets, so if it's just stopped working that's probably why.