While working on a new multilingual project, a need arose to convert my current vBulletin database to UTF-8. I thought the process would be relatively simple, but it turned out to be a nightmare that I struggled with three days. And yes, I did try the “vCharset Converter” module, which is unmaintained, sucks bad and never works. I ended up successfully converting the database to UTF-8 and everything so far has been working great, so I decided to post a quick how-to for those who are planning to convert their vBulletin forums. My previous database charset was “latin1/latin1_swedish_ci” (MySQL default) and I was using “windows-1251″ codepage to accomodate Cyrillic characters in my forum. Here is the procedure:
