Posts containing Greek or Russian or Chinese, etc...?

[?Almirena?]

Hello,

Our forum (2.0.11) ought to be able to have members posting in various languages (classical Greek, Russian, Chinese, etc.). It's not been possible to date; all that is posted is a maddening array of question marks.

I've checked in Admin to see which character set is being used: it is ISO-8859-1. We only have the default English language pack installed.

From searching here, it seems that what I must do is go to Forum Maintenance > Convert the database and data to UTF-8. However, this option does not appear.

Maintenance -> Database -> Convert HTML-entities to UTF-8 characters DOES appear.

Do I simply run that instead?

And do I need to download the English language pack again? And would I need also to download and install the language packs of other languages which some of the forum members might wish to use when quoting something in a foreign language in their posts?

And do I need then to run a query in PHPMyAdmin to convert each user's language settings?

Code Select Expand

UPDATE smf_members
SET lngfile = CONCAT(lngfile, '-utf8')
WHERE lngfile != ''

(Of course backing up first is essential.)

[Kindred]

yes, that is the correct spot in maintenance.

yes, you would neevd to download and install the UTF-8 versions of the language packs

you would also need to change the forum itself to use UTF-8. change the default language to the urf-8 version and probably uninstall the non-utf-8 languages

not sure about the force switch of users in the database...  but possibly