So my host wanted to:

  • move your MySQL VPS instance to newer, more powerful hardware that uses lightning-fast NVMe drives (rather than older, traditional HDDs) for storage.
  • Once the move has been completed, the MySQL version will change from 5.7. to MySQL 8.

The move was pretty problem free for the most part. However, some of the posts on THIS website have screwed up Chinese characters. I’ve tried to implement some fixes… but I can’t fix it! You’ll see text like this:

I can only speculate that the reason for this is that the DB is itself quite old, so the original character set was anybody’s guess! I’m still not sure what it should be. The other bilingual sites on this server are fine. So I’m not sure what gives!

Photo by Rubaitul Azad on Unsplash