Anyone else having forum problems?

[paulsherwin]

It's a general issue of unicode compatibility between browsers, the forum code, the MySQL backend, the data table configuration and the hosting company's server side security. The results of trying to enter non-ASCII characters are unpredictable - sometimes it will work, sometimes the characters will display as question marks or diamonds, and sometimes the update operation will fail with a security error. Paul Stenning is aware of all this, but there are no quick'n'dirty fixes other than avoiding extended character sets.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#Character_set.

[Paul Stenning]

I get several database error emails each day, most relating to character set issues. So it does need to be sorted by converting all the database tables to UTF-8, albeit not urgently hence a potential Christmas break job.

UTF-8 (unicode) is the default for web servers, database servers and browsers etc now, so it is best to go with it where possible to minimise issues and maximise compatibility.

[Wellertcp]

What I've seen done on other forums; rather than try to 'migrate' to a new platform, the original forum is locked and kept as a 'read-only' archive, and a 'new' forum is started using the new software.

[Paul Stenning]

Yes I have seen that a couple of times. Not an ideal solution for members, but it does retain the information which is most important. I'm hoping to do it properly as-and-when needed, but if not possible then it is a "Plan B".