Outdoorking, changing the string in generic.php is only one thing. You say that you just update your forum. How old is your first installation? Take a closer look to your database with phpmyadmin. The database itself should running in utf-8 but if you look at the tables you maybe find in the collaboration settings other settings as utf-8. In this case UBB.threads store any chars in this coding page and if you change the string in generic.php you will end up in black questionsmarks.
Now you can do 3 things:
1) set the generic.php string to your coding (maybe iso-something). All will be fine but you run in trouble sometimes in the future
2) set the generic.php to utf-8 and change the collaboration for each table to utf-8 too. This result in propper settings for any new posting only and show black questionsmarks for old postings because they stored in an other codepage.
3) do step 2 and then go to each table content and change the coding inside the table to utf-8 coding. This is something that only user should do who know what is phpmyadmin and how to handle table content. I write something about this here:
https://www.ubbcentral.com/forums/u...coding-utf-8-and-older-forums#Post261912Thats my way to do it. It should be better ways but it work for me. It left over user profiles, signatures and forum intro text but thats can be changed step by step in the admin section if you see one of the nasty black ?
In my example I only change german umlaute like öäü but forget to search for €, `´ and '
This need to be changed too.
But remember: do a backup first! And do a backup!
