problems with encoding

[Awilum]

Today I go to their forum and see that everything in hieroglyphs.
http://pascalgames.net/index.php?action=forum

all topics is empty
http://pascalgames.net/index.php?topic=439.msg1968;boardseen#new

What happened? how to fix it?

[kat]

No hieroglyphs, just Russian. Is it not supposed to be in Russian?


I can see quite a few posts, but not all of them.


The blank posts. Do they appear, if you use the SMF default theme?

[Awilum]

in phpmyadmin I see my post and topics(table: smf_messages) fields (subject) like this

РЎРїРёСЃРѕРє РёРіСЂ FreeWare сделанныС... РЅ...

at the forum I see a lot of empty topic

and this is not good also

[kat]

No hieroglyphs, just Russian. Is it not supposed to be in Russian?


I can see quite a few posts, but not all of them.


The blank posts. Do they appear, if you use the SMF default theme?

[Awilum]

i Set default theme and i see also empty topics(some texts i can see)

and this hieroglyphs

[kat]

No hieroglyphs, just Russian (I think). Is it not supposed to be in Russian?

[Awilum]

[kat]

Ah, those...


Yeah, that's kinda weird, innit?


Have added anything, or edited/removed anything, recently?


Like a mod, or something?

[Awilum]

10 days ago, burned datacenter, they rebuilt it and the site two days ago.
The site worked for two days and today without any reason that's such characters and the empty topics.

[kat]

You don't happen to have a backup, taken just before the datacentre went up in smoke, do you?


I'm just thinking out-loud, here... Have you tried repairing the database, from your site's cpanel?

[Awilum]

I tried to repair the tables in phpmyadmin but it did not help.
I have a backup of the database in February. I tried to restore the database from this backup, but the problem remains

[kat]

Hmmm... OK. Let's assume that the database is OK, then, shall we?


Do you have many mods installed?


If NOT, it might be worth you getting the SMF install archive, dearchiving it, then uploading all the files in the default theme's directory and the Sources directory, too, overwriting what you have, now.


If you have a lot of mods, though, doing that's likely to screw them, I'm afraid.


If you're using a version of SMF that's older than v1.1.11, upgrading might well fix it, too.

[Awilum]

I download full smf 1.1.11 from this site and upload it to my server, but problem remains.
may be that something was wrong with the database ?

[kat]

Yuk!


Have a word with your host. They may well have a backup of the database that they can restore, from before their server fried.

[Awilum]

they gave me a backup for March 27.
I import it but the problem remained the same.
I even tried to put backup database in February but the problems remained the same.
Datacenter hosting.ua did not say how to solve this problem and why it

[MrPhil]

When you were set back up, did you check the database encoding? MySQL defaults to Latin-1, so it's possible that it's sending invalid characters to the UTF-8 page. If you're using the Cyrillic character set, I would think your database needs to be UTF-8. If a Cyrillic backup was imported into a Latin-1 database, some data may be corrupted -- you would need to empty out the database, change the table character encoding to UTF-8, and re-import the backup.

I can't see for sure what kind of data is being sent to the page, as it's in maintenance mode now. Anyway, my guess is that the "hieroglyphics" are the UTF "invalid character" code, although I can't be sure. As for the Russian text, I see you are Ukrainian -- do you use Russian, or did some pro-Soviet hacker change your setup? I hear that the politics there are pretty murky these days.

At any rate, you want your database character encoding, language support files, and page display encoding to all be singing from the same page -- presumably UTF-8. Have you gone through everything to check this?

[kat]

Good finkin', Mr. P! 

[Awilum]

how can this be?

[flapjack]

theres a problem with encoding with one or more of your files

[Awilum]

okey
if I wrote $db_character_set = 'cp1251'; in Settings.php i see corect data, but not all !


if I wrote $db_character_set = 'utf8'; in Settings.php i see all data! but like this



my DB character set is cp1251