Having problems with language coding? Look here!

[quuu]

Hi, I just want to share the solution with those who have language coding problem when you install a forum system through Fantastico but your language characters cannot correctly show.
If your target language of a web site is non-latin, for example, Chinese or Japanese, please don't use the Fantastico. Installation through Fantastico only supports latin-related lanuages by default.
You can check all the databases in phpMyadmin, the collation is latin_swedish by default.
You need to download the packages, for example, SMF or Moodle from their official web sites and upload them to your server.
Go to MySQL and set up new databases and database usernames.
After installation, you'll find the language coding will not be a problem any more.
All the collations are utf8_general_ci by default.
In this case, your web sites will allow any language in the world to function normally.

In this multi-lingual world, I believe Bluehost should cater their service for web site hosts from all over the world. Therefore, the utf8 language coding is basic necessity. I hope they can improve this.

Since this forum is only dedicated to users of Bluehost, their technicians and staff don't come here to see whether they can be of help or not. I propose that anyone who has language coding problems report this problem to Bluehost and ask them to improve.
If only I report this problem, Bluehost will think that's not a big deal--only one customer. If many of you can all report this and ask them to change, they may think it's a big need to think about.
Thanks!

[felgall]

It is not BlueHost who need to make this change, it is Fantastico who have configured their installs to work that way.

Why don't you contact Fantastico and make the suggestion to them. There is a contact link on their web site http://www.netenberg.com/fantastico.php

[quuu]

It is not BlueHost who need to make this change, it is Fantastico who have configured their installs to work that way.

Why don't you contact Fantastico and make the suggestion to them. There is a contact link on their web site http://www.netenberg.com/fantastico.php

Hi, thanks for your information. I've just posted the message in their forum.
I also hope that Bluehost can report this to them, because Bluehost is the company that uses their product. Bluehost is also one of their customers. Besides, company to company is also a great way to make them change, because you represent a great number of users in the world. To some extent, Bluehost is actually also responsible for finding ways to satisfy its customers and help them solve any solvable problems. Thanks!

[Dennis A. Kmetz]

I get the same results (collation of latin1-swedish-ci) with a manual mySQL database creation. As I understand it, this is controled via the server variables per this documentation
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-connection.html

I am opening a ticket to see what the bluehost support team says.

[Reverendspam]

Apparently this still has not been fixed by Bluehost.

I have been with BH about 3 years...have never had any major issues. This is becoming a problem as the Sweedish character set is having problems with web browsers of folks that have set their viewing to utf8. Users are seeing strange characters.

This is not an issue of Fantastico or Simple Scripts.

When I first signed up with BH I used to be able to create my databases in phpadmin. This was not an issue as I could set my character set upon database creation.

Now that I can no longer create databases with phpmyadmin and have to use the create database script in which there is no option for the end user to set the character set and it is set to the Swedish character set as the default.

I am also opening up a support ticket and hopefully this will be taken care of and BH will at least set their default to utf8 with the database install script on their end.

I really do not want to start looking for another host and have to learn their quirks, but this is somewhat serious in that is creating issues for the small amount of users on my sites.