New host and Greek letters show up as question marks

[Greek76]

Migrated from vb cloud to my new host and all my Greek characters are showing up as ??? marks. I contacted knownhost but they told me it’s a vb issue?

[Wayne Luke]

• First make sure that you're still using the UTF-8 HTML character set for your Language under Languages & Phrases -> Language Manager.
• Next make sure that you're still using a UTF-8 compatible Locale on the same page. For Greek, it should be el_GR.UTF-8. If this locale is not available on the server, the hosting provider will need to install it.
• If the characters still do not show, then it is a database configuration issue.

Question Marks will appear when the database does not support UTF-8. vBulletin 5.6.X works best with the UTF8MB character set and an appropriate collation like utf8mb4_general_ci. If you're not using a UTF-8 character set on the database and the connection to the database, then you will not be able to display UTF-8 characters like the Greek Alphabet. You can read about MySQL's character sets and collations here: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7...-database.html. Your hosting provider should be able to help you change the server settings for MySQL.

To diagnose the character set and collation used by your installation of vBulletin:

In vBulletin's AdminCP go to Maintenance -> Diagnostics and under System Information, set it to show table status. This will tell you what character set you're currently using. Next look at MySQL Variables and note the values of character_set_client, character_set_connection, and character_set_database. These should all be utf8mb4 for the best experience. We have provided scripts in the do_not_upload/dbtools directory of your vBulletin download to convert the database tables if necessary. The instructions are in the article named "vBulletin 5 Database Tools."

[Greek76]

Yes Im still using UTF-8 HTML in language manager but I where do I check for the Greek utf8mb4_unicode_ci? I never installed a Greek language on the forum. I just typed in Greek characters for thread descriptions and titles on the forum.

[Wayne Luke]

From above -

In vBulletin's AdminCP go to Maintenance -> Diagnostics and under System Information, set it to show table status. This will tell you what character set you're currently using. Next look at MySQL Variables and note the values of character_set_client, character_set_connection, and character_set_database. These should all be utf8mb4 for the best experience. We have provided scripts in the do_not_upload/dbtools directory of your vBulletin download to convert the database tables if necessary. The instructions are in the article named "vBulletin 5 Database Tools."

[Greek76]

Ok so i relayed the info to them and their response was...

've consulted with other techs in the building and the consensus is you will need to seek out a proper mysql dev's assistance as you will need to be sure the charsets are the same. I suspect the defaults set for vB cloud servers are different than cPanel's and this is causing the issues you're seeing.

[Greek76]

From above -

I used that tool. It shows each table is using utf8mb4_unicode_ci

[Greek76]

So in the end I just ended up rewriting everything in Greek and now it's working on all browsers on my end.. Go figure?

[Wayne Luke]

It could have been an issue with the tool used to import the backup into a new database. It may not support UTF-8.