Apologies for the confusion. Just for clarity, this is what I was referring to but either works as they lead to the same place:
Glad to hear you were able to resolve the issue.
While I understand you're not happy with this change, it is actually done to ease the support process and make it easier to find answers yourself and get help faster. For years, we have been saying that forums are an amazing resource for support but have never used it, value answers sat behind tickets, never to be reused again, along with our community laid to waste. We decided about 2+ years ago now to transfer all the start of technical support from tickets to forums; essentially "eat our own dog food" type scenario. We sent out emails alerting all our clients of this change and posted in our community here. Many had the same mentality as yourself, it was a downgrade, support will be horrible, etc... I think a lot of those individuals, after actually using it now prefer our community/forum support over tickets as they can find/get help faster and compare what they're facing to previous issues.
As you have seen here, a very high percentage tickets are still handled by our staff (hi, I am a staff member š ) . However, we do have third party providers who provide third party services who tend to answer as well and that is benefit too because you get aware of their services and get assistance from them. Then we also have clients who just like being here and interacting/helping everyone. Just like on your community, people like to help others and discuss something that bond them together for no real monetary gain. That is what makes a healthy community, and, in this case, it is centered around our product.
Sorry, believe there is a misunderstanding here or misremembering. Even in our previous support pattern of allowing tickets first, we did not provide support for hosting environments, such as PHP, database, etc... That has not changed as we moved to this community pattern.
If you have questions on software requirements of the server, etc... we can answer that, but we cannot tell you specifics about your hosting environment or how to configure/perform an action in them. That is for your hosting provider to perform or tell you. If you do not have a support contract with your provider, you may wish to hire a server administrator or switch to our Cloud platform where you won't have to worry about those items.
Also, in the classic support forum that we're in now, we do allow server-based questions to be answered by fellow clients so you could post that up here and gain insights.
Ultimately, while we do not directly support server environments, there's no reason to struggle on your own. You have options.
Apologies, this is indeed something to improve on in the software. Those not using UTF8MB4 are few and far in between and may have missed the upgrade step where it was required to change. I will bring this up internally.
As mentioned above, this is indeed a gap in the software and of that, few and far in between are not using UTF8MB4. However, is indeed something we need to correct.