Upgrade an Arabic vbulletin 3.x to 5.x and convert it's mysql data from cp1256/latin1 to utf8
Back in 2009 internet was full of community forums to the point where every person would install forum and make his own community especially here in Iraq. a lot of communities were powered by vbulletin software and most of them died. however there are some sites that still up today. Last week I was tasked to upgrade one of those sites from vbulletin 3.8 to vbulletin 5.7 . so I grabbed a copy of its database, Started an upgrade simulation and BOOM nothing works as intended. Let me explain a step by step process, first of all the vbulletin 5.7 requires mysql 8.0 to actually work but vbulletin 3.8 won't work on mysql 8.0 because it sets utf-8 chraset on new connections so you have edit vbulletin 3.8 config file located here includes/config.php Uncomment and modify this line as shown below $config['Mysqli']['charset'] = 'latin1'; The above line shall run your vbulletin 3.8 on mysql 8.0 without gibberish characters. Why latin1 ? Si