diff --git a/phpBB/docs/CHANGELOG.html b/phpBB/docs/CHANGELOG.html
index 35b6d45e8d..bdfe15fa87 100644
--- a/phpBB/docs/CHANGELOG.html
+++ b/phpBB/docs/CHANGELOG.html
@@ -91,6 +91,7 @@
 		<li>[Fix] Moved topics should not count towards the number of topics in a forum (Bug #14648 / thanks to Schumi for his patch)</li>
 		<li>[Fix] Properly check for invalid characters in MySQL DB prefixes during install (Bug #18775)</li>
 		<li>[Change] Generalize load check (Bug #21255 / thanks to Xipher)</li>
+		<li>[Change] Make utf8_htmlspecialchars not pass its argument by reference (Bug #21885)</li>
 	</ul>
 
 	<a name="v300"></a><h3>1.ii. Changes since 3.0.0</h3>
diff --git a/phpBB/includes/utf/utf_tools.php b/phpBB/includes/utf/utf_tools.php
index b30f28aac9..8098176837 100644
--- a/phpBB/includes/utf/utf_tools.php
+++ b/phpBB/includes/utf/utf_tools.php
@@ -1840,7 +1840,7 @@ function utf8_clean_string($text)
 /**
 * A wrapper for htmlspecialchars($value, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8')
 */
-function utf8_htmlspecialchars(&$value)
+function utf8_htmlspecialchars($value)
 {
 	return htmlspecialchars($value, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');
 }