More details. I went at it from the angle of "what special rights does SUPER grant that this might need".
I then turned on full logs and looked at test runs of looking at the main forum listing with super on vs super off.
I'll note first that without super I *do* get the SET NAMES command that I want. So this is a worthwhile quest, to get a non-SUPER account to use the tables so I can then use the SET NAMES to get my UTF8.
There are TWO differences in the log files.
First: At the end of the healthy run, ubbt_ONLINE gets updated. In the no-Super-access run, that statement is completely absent. I have tested with PHP and the ubblisa account can run that statement. So it's not an access issue.
Second: Before that happens, there is a whole block of SELECTS missing, where it selects from each forum ID and gets the count of posts, sum of posts, and so on. So in the non-SUPER run it goes right from getting the forum title, desc. etc. - skipping over the forum-by-forum queries - and lands right on getting the category title, ID, etc.
So this makes sense. This is why it says there aren't any forums. It never did the selects to get them.
Now to figure out why
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