Originally Posted by Rick
We can't change this forum to UTF-8 because we already have way too much data in the database that's iso-8859-1.
I think it is not so hard.
My forum's topic number exceeds 1 million .
I changed my encoding from Big5 to UTF8 at topic number about 800000 , it just took a few hours.

iso-8859-1 to UTF-8 migration is almost painless , because there would be no character loss problem. Just dump the db and use sed to alter the table charset to UTF-8 and re-feed to MySQL , it should work.

Unike Big5 to UTF8 , there would be an extra iconv step to convert the character encoding.

Ubbcentral forum has about 220000 topics , it should be able to finish within one hour.

English is not my native language. I try my best to express my thought precisely. I hope you understand what I mean. If any misunderstanding results from culture gaps, I apologize first.