I'm just wondering if it's difficult to convert back from utf-8 to iso-8559-1 and if there are risks involved.
I'm administering 2 forums and I would like to have them the same. My own forum upgraded to utf-8 in the beginning because I thought this would be better, but I didn't experience any benefits to it in 1,5 year running it like this.
Only more work, for example I have to use the utf-8 translation or other things for utf-8, while for iso-8559-1 I can use the default stuff, no extras needed.
But how about existing translations, smilies, links, but especially the special characters like é and € etc. which are already present in existing posts. Do they get converted correctly?
I see a lot bout converting -to- UTF-8 but almost nothing about converting back. :)
Shortly said, can converting back to iso-8559-1 be safely done? Just curious about this and problems which might occur.
There is no tool to do it. At least not from SMF.
You might get howto's in Google but I'd recommend you not trying it. Instead go UTF8 in all.
2.1 already uses UTF8 as default as well as most other forum scripts.
If there is no tool to do it, it can't be done without problems I guess it's better not done in that case.
So you recommend upgrading to UTF-8 in the other forum too. That's an option also indeed, I need the owners permission in that case.
Thank you for the advise!