No , because of historical issues.
I used UBBT since WWWThreads (perl version) with mysql 3.23 , mysql didn't support i18n at that time , all Chinese characters were encoded in latin1 (8859_1).
After upgrading to UBBT 6 and MySQL 4 , the DB/table/column still encode in default latin1_swedish_ci.
I just need to set $ubbt_lang['CHARSET'] to BIG5 and it works fine.
I know UTF8 encoding maybe the ultimate solution. But I don't know how to change the whole DB/TABLE/column encoded to UTF8 ... Can somebody give me some hints ?