[Forum] I need help fixing an old vbulletin 4 database character encoding

[idansx]

I have a large vbulletin database (more than 2gb) of an old website I once had. The website is in Hebrew language and I remember that many years ago the character encoding of my database was latin1 and I converted it to UTF8. I remember I was following a guide on vbulletin.org on how to convert the database. I can't remember what I was doing exactly because it was many years ago, but I remember that after I did this conversion the forum was running fine and the only problem I had was that the search feature didn't work for Hebrew keywords. I solved it by using Sphinx search plugin from Digital Point, but I no longer have this plugin these days and I honestly don't think I need it since the website is dead and I just want to bring up online for nostalgia.
Anyway I want to resolve this search problem without using any additional plugins, I believe there's still something wrong with the database because when I am checking the database on phpmyadmin I can still see that there are some latin1 tables even though the main character encoding is set to UTF8.
I will appreciate if there's anyone who can guide me how to resolve this issue

This is how the database look like right now if it helps: https://imgur.com/a/2V7r0jX

Thank you

[Wayne Luke]

vBulletin 4 doesn't support UTF-8. You should convert your database back to latin1 or restore the database backup made from before the conversion.

vBulletin 4 has its own sphinx search implementation. You don't need a third-party system. However, it won't search UTF-8 characters due to a lack of support. vBulletin 5.6.X supports UTF-8 searching with Sphinx.

[idansx]

I did this conversion around 10 years ago, this is the only database I have these days. How can I convert it back to latin1? Do you have any guide or scripts to assist me?
Honestly I would prefer to upgrade to vBulletin 5 and have full UTF8MB4 support
Is it something I can achieve? If yes, should I convert it to latin1 and then after upgrading to VB5 convert it to UTF8MB4?

[Wayne Luke]

We provide database tools to convert vBulletin 5 databases to UTF8MB4. This is the recommended character set and used by all new vBulletin 5.6.X installations. vBulletin 5 supports UTF-8 characters though there may be issues with content from before the conversion due to how vBulletin 4 stores its data.

We do not have scripts for vBulletin 4.X because we never supported conversion and it was created before MySQL really supported UTF-8. After upgrading, the database tools should be able to work with what you have.