UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.threads Version 7/8 Support Weird characters showing up

Our hosting company upgraded our server from mysql 5.7.44 to version 8.0 without even notifying us first.

Now we have weird characters showing all over the forums. This is one example: https://www.stovebolt.com/ubbthread...-chevrolet-3100-project.html#Post1526670 (See attached screenshot).

Is there a way to fix this globally? Or do we have to fix each one manually?

Before the upgrade, I had already converted the tables to utd8mb4 (in preparation for the upgrade), and we were not seeing these issues. So, I think it's something strange that happened during the ugprade.

Make sure that all the tables got converted
Also in cp
master settings
Paths&database
database tab
MySQL Full Unicode Support (utf8mb4) should be checked

In language files Generic
CHARSET utf-8
https://www.ubbcentral.com/forums/u...apostrophes-and-periods-oh-my#Post265079

The tables were converted a couple of weeks ago.

MySQL Full Unicode Support was not checked. (It is now.)

Should the charset in the generic language file be utf8? Or utf8mb4?

utf-8

It looks like the curly backtick (from word generally, why do people prep stuff in office before posting to a plain text editor I'll never understand).

You should be able to use find/replace syntax to replace ’ with ' via MySQL.

Common replaces are:
“ = left quote = “
” = right quote = ”
‘ = left single quote = ‘
’ = right single quote = ’
— = en dash = –
– = em dash = —
• = hyphen = -
… = ellipsis = …

Gizmo, I can't thank you enough for this list. I've managed to replace almost all the Windows characters with proper ones.

Gizmo, since you were so helpful with those, maybe you can help me with these: 👍🇺🇸😁
I believe they are emojis. I've been looking for a code table that explains which ones they are, but no success so far. Weird how all these characters got screwed up just by upgrading to mysql 8.0

Never mind. I found this site, which works like a champ. https://www.linestarve.com/tools/mojibake/

I don't think there is a chart, at least that I've seen, for emoji's but it looks like several of them are emoji's; I really just Google, but try to post back when I find new ones

This is just weird. I saw this today in Control Panel.

Clearly I have something set wrong, but what?

MySQL Full Unicode Support (utf8mb4) is selected. What could be causing this? Something in the mysql 8.0 conf? The tables have all been converted to utf8mb4.

I assume this is from Cpanel somewhere.
Where did you see this?

It shows that your data center is in Argentina and your isp is Nodosud S.A

UBB provides that information with every registration. I always check the actual location from which they registered with the location that claim to be from. If it's nonsenical, I deny the registration.

So, somehow, UBB is not rendering characters in utf8, which makes no sense at all to me because the doctype is utf8 and the db is using utdfmb4.

okay then that is a ip lookup of a new registrant
whats wrong with it?
If you are concerned about the à that is proper In this case it is actually a tilde to denote proper pronunciation.
https://study.com/academy/lesson/accents-in-spanish-marks-rules.html
Not sure about the ± part though

No, this is not a proper accent. ñe This is a character set akin to what Gizmo posted above.

actually Ubb ip lookup just goes to a third party and transmits the ip to
https://whatismyipaddress.com in a separate tab on the browser.
I tried your suspect ip and I get


Decimal:3188442210

Hostname:host98.190-11-196.nodosud.com.ar

ASN:27953

ISP:Nodosud S.A

Services:None detected

Assignment:Likely Static IP

Country:Argentina

State/Region:Cordoba

City:Ordonez

Latitude:-32.8406 (32° 50′ 26.05″ S)

Longitude:-62.8655 (62° 51′ 55.87″ W)

So, the display is Ordoñez, X AR but it should be Ordoñez. The characters ñ are a representation of ñ. My question is, why is UBB displaying the characters that it is instead of the unicode character?

Stupid me I figured out what you are looking at
reverse geo location.
I never enable that feature due to the risk of being blacklisted.
I just mouse click on the ip

Enable Reverse Geo-IP Lookups
Perform instant reverse Geo-IP address lookups for User Registration and Last Login IPs using the IP Geolocation API. The limit is 150 requests per minute from an IP address. If you go over this limit your IP address will be blackholed. You can unban here. If you need unlimited queries, please see their pro service.

But it is still a lookup so I don;t have a clue
Maybe that issue is a browser setting or api?????

No, it's not a browser setting. These characters are appearing to everyone that views our forum, including Windows, Linux, and Mac users using every browser you could possibly imagine. Somehow, since the update to mysql 8.0, some characters are not being rendered in unicode. This includes ALL emojis created by the logged-in users computer or phone as well as punctuation characters such as double-quotes, single-qoutes, ellipese, and dashes.

I just ran the api
It reports correctly as Ordoñez
https://ip-api.com/docs/api:serialized_php
So it must be something in the UBB cp script that is misinterpreting it.

Have you tried the age old fix all "clear cache" in UBB?

I just logged in at stove bolt can you provide a url to a problem post I can't find one so far

We've been furiously fixed them all, so I'm not sure how many are left. However, I have put up a webpage where you can view screenshots of what we are seeing. AND, the owners just informed me that the weird characters are showing up in webmail as well, so it looks like this might be something on the server not related to mysql. Here's the webpage: https://www.stovebolt.com/weirdness.html

What, on a server, determines the charset used by default?

It occurred to me that this might be a setting in the apache conf. So, I checked: AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 was set correctly in the main conf file. I added it to the stovebolt conf file. We'll see if that fixes the problem.

Look what I got in email.
Notice how it's rendered? So, this is clearly not a UBB problem. It's something on the server that is incorrectly configured.

I'm sorry for taking up so much time on an issue that's unrelated to UBB.

just for thrills and giggles what is the charset for your php.
you can run php info from the ubb CP

The charset for php is utf8. I checked locale on the server. Everything was set to utf8 except for LC_ALL which was empty. I set that to en_US.UTF-8. We shall see if that solves the problem.