UTF-8 conversion

[goofy2feet]

I wonder what the reason is for not having UTF-8 as the standard format for the database and data, but my support question is about specifically whether or not the warnings on the selection page indicate that switching to UTF-8 might mangle my forum? Has anyone else done this successfully?

I've done some website coding myself and have never made a site that was not set up in the first place with UTF-8 as the encoding.