I've moved this message from another thread:
"if I leave the default english interface, I am still able to post cyrillic messages and they are dispayed correctly, but ones posted by other users who set up their interface to russian are crappy re-converted. It still is possible make it to display correctly by selecting 'View' encoding as 'Windows-1251' manually, but again, it will display specific german, french, etc. letters incorrectly in this case, and worse, for every other site too. Assigning $l_meta empty string, as suggested in manual, does not help in fact.
So, I hope there must be another fix or solution that helps for sure, 'coz I see a variety of forums over there, which manage this situation perfectly."
So,
for setting-up the multiple encoding forums (UTF-8), it's the most better idea to start them in UTF-8 mode. For this:
1) All language packs must be converted to UTF-8 (not a completely easy job, I know, but worth it). So each language pack should be saved in UTF-8 encoding. And, it should contain
charset=utf-8 under
$l_meta variable.
2) Allow only latin symbols in
$userRegName setting of setup_options.php (it comes that way by default). Of course, it's possible also specify some symbols in UTF-8 here, but I doubt it's worth it, since you will need to change a lot of fields in database later.
3)
topic_title field of
minibbtopics_table in database must be specified as '
text' type (by default, comes as
varchar(255)). SQL command for this:
ALTER TABLE `minibb_topics` CHANGE `topic_title` `topic_title` TEXT;
4) generic
bb_func_txt.php file of miniBB package should be used as from the latest version 2.0.3. It has some fixes regarding symbols encoded in UTF-8.
I hope that's all for regular forums...
