MySQL 5.5 Windows install defaults to UTF

[Ray Smithers]

We suffered a major crash without a conscise all-in-one-place backup, and had to rebuild a new server from scratch. In the process, we upgraded to the latest stable production versions of PHP and MySQL.

Here's a heads up to folks in similar situations. The latest MySQL msi installer defaults to UTF8 charsets and collations, which causes an "illegal mix of collations" error when IPB attempts to display post content.

When building from scratch, make sure MySQL builds its install with the connection/collation default to latin1/latin1_swedish_ci. If you don't, all is not lost, you can launch the reconfigure wizard to change it, as long as you've loaded the backed up databases in a way they retain their original encoding.