Full Board URL: http://forum.solbu.net/
XMB Version: 1.9.11

In august 2013 we had a critical error in our forum after Upgrading our Debian server to Debian 7, which was fixed after some helpfull suggestions from you guys.

(This error is by the way now present in this forum also. I had to write this post twice, because using the tree special characters to serve as an example blanked out the entire post. So you need to fix this forum also)

Now we have detected that when we Edit a forum or a sub forum and the name contains one of the norwegian speial characters, the edited forum name is Blanked out, resulting in us having to be creative in naming the sub forums if we need to edit them.

Does anyone know how to fix that?

The issue could be due to using latin1 encoding as opposed to UTF-8.

In phpmyadmin, you can see the character encoding used by your tables.

If it were me, I'd check that first, then:

- set up another test xmb forum.
- when the database has been created, check the character type
- if it's latin1, change it to utf-8
- create posts, forum areas etc with the Norwegian special characters.
- if you verify that Norwegian special characters work with utf-8, then:

Make a complete backup copy of your actual live database in case anything goes wrong. Run the following on the live forum DB and tables. If you're extra cautious and this is what I'd do, then replace the test forum by copying the data from the live forum to the test forum and run the following on the test forum first to see if it all worked fine, then if all ok, run it on the live forum:

Run the following, replacing databasename with your actual DB name and tablename for each xmb table name.
- ALTER DATABASE databasename CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
- ALTER TABLE tablename CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;

Quote: Originally posted by lottos

The issue could be due to using latin1 encoding as opposed to UTF-8.

The encoding is already utf8.

Quote:

- set up another test xmb forum.

I'm about to go to work now, so I'll try that tonight (European time).

But just to be clear. It is Not blanking the posts. It is blanking the name of the Sub Forum itself, when I edit the settings of the sub forum.

If you are using the provided English or Norsk translations, these are totally incompatible with UTF-8 database tables. I would give the opposite advice here and make sure your database has a single-byte encoding. The upcoming 1.9.11.15 should fix some of the compatibility problems within XMB.

Also, you can use a trick that is compatible with all character encodings, which is to convert the special characters to HTML character entity references. For example, "nå" instead of "nå". This isn't too difficult for small phrases like forum titles.