MariaDB Foreign Characters

I'm having the weirdest issue with foreign characters on my forum. I'm been racking my brain trying to figure out what the issue is.

Here is the story.

---

I have an IPB v3.4.9 forum on cPanel right now. Everything works fine, foreign characters show up correctly on the site. Databse is MyISAM with utf8_unicode_ci collation.

Front end of site shows:

Code:

Обсуждение

What shows up in the database:

Code:

Цифровые Ñ

I'm setting up the forum on my dev server for testing with the end result of moving the site to CMM. I exported the db out of cPanel via command line dump and restored it to a db created on Centmin Mod running the default CMM my.conf setup.

The site works fine on the development server, everything which is English / Spanish (latin characters) shows correctly. Though, I'm having an issue with what is showing up on the front end of the site.

Front end of dev site shows:

Code:

Цифровые токены 

What shows up in the database:

Code:

Цифровые токены 

I've tried to convert the database a number of ways, but I still get the same thing above.

Here is the real kicker. On the development server, with the output shown above, if I create a new forum using foreign characters the foreign characters show up correctly on the forum.

Anyone have any idea what is going wrong?

 

Yea, I have 2 servers here:
1. VPS running cPanel with Centos 6 (LIVE)
2. Local machine running CMM 123.09beta01 (DEV / TESTING)

Dump

Code:

mysqldump -u <username> -p <database> > /root/backups/databases/<database>_backup_date.sql

Restore

Code:

mysql -u <username> -p <database> < /path/to/<database>_backup_date.sql

There is a setting in the IPB admin for the language charaset which is set correctly. I did a test on the dev server after the restore. I created a new topic using foreign language characters they appeared correctly.

I was only messing with the character set to try to resolve the issue. Since the database is on my testing server there was no harm done to the live site which is still on cPanel.

The problem with IPB support is that they stopped supporting v3 a month ago and the support forum for v3 are buried on the main forum on the IPS site. Not sure I would get a reply. Most people moved to v4 by now.

A couple months back I did this same thing - setup a DEV site using CMM. At that time I did the same steps above and had no issues with the characters.

Today I'm going to try to upgrade the board and see if upgrading to v4 will solve the issue. v4 converts everything to utf8mb4 so hopefully that will solve the issue.