I had a few problems during conversion. I could see that the database text encoding had changed (at least, the sample pieces of text I was checking had changed appropriately), but UBB was still showing diamonds.
Your UBB.threads was still showing black diamonds for older posts, since that is how they were originally stored before you updated your database's collation from latin1 (latin1_swedish_ci) to utf8 (utf8_general_ci)
Have a quick skim through this page - I know its long, but its worth just skimming through it to quickly pickup a concept you may have missed:
http://sqlmag.com/database-performance-tuning/seven-step-process-changing-database-collationEDIT: Here is a more simple link that speaks "yours and mine language" much better
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1294117/how-to-change-collation-of-database-table-columnThe database character set and collation for 758 and 759 remained the same. There were zero database modifications between 758 and 759.
An initial install of UBB.threads uses the
character set and its
collation that is set within your database software.
So if your database is setup to use "utf8 (UTF-8 Unicode)" Character set, with a "utf8_general_ci" collation as the default, that is what will be used for the initial installation of UBB.threads.
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The only updates regarding "UTF-8" in UBB.threads 7.5.9 are in the HTML header.
The <meta charset="UTF-8"> is for "display only" settings. It tells the user's browser which character encoding set to use for displaying the HTML page.
Common values:
UTF-8 - Character encoding for Unicode
ISO-8859-1 - Character encoding for the Latin alphabet
In theory, any character encoding can be used, but no browser understands all of them. The more widely a character encoding is used, the better the chance that a browser will understand it.
More reading on this can be found at
https://code.google.com/p/doctype-mirror/wiki/MetaCharsetAttributeUBB.threads was updated to use UTF-8 in version 7.5.9 since it is the most widely used upon today's internet.
In UBBT759, there were exactly two files changed regarding the character set (charset meta tag);
1-languages/generic.php - this change only effect HTML headers.
2-languages/myfeeds.php - this change only effects RSS feed encoding. This declaration should have never been in the RSS feed in the first place. So by updating it from "iso-8859-1" to "utf-8" proved to only point out an long standing error within the template file. This was also hard-coded within 758's templates/default/rss_xml.tpl for some reason, and that made its way in to 759's release code. As of 760, it has been fixed by removing it.
Both of these items overwrote your previous "meta charset" language setting during an automatic 759 language upgrade. Doing that was a programming error on my part. I did not foresee that it would cause an issue, such as page display. In the future, character set encoding within the language files will not be pushed in to the upgrader script.
As relating to UBB.threads 7.6.0, there are no additional updates to the database planned at this time, and I do not foresee any to happen between now and the time it will be released.
