Database migration tomorrow

[Ralle]

The site will be down for 30-60 minutes tomorrow at around this time.

I have written a script that will take the whole current database and item by item (posts, reputation, threads, downloads) convert every text item into UTF-8 which previously apparently was a mix of windows-1252 and ISO-8859-1.
This should fix the � symbol issue.

I will update this notification when the process is over. If you find any weird symbols that looks like data corruption after this is done, please message me as soon as possible. This is a big operation and if something went wrong, we need to know immediately so we won't lose any valuable data.

Also, if the site is slow right now it is because I am doing test runs of the process I will be doing tomorrow. I am however throttling it so the site doesn't fall apart (as it has done twice today already because of this).

UPDATE (Sep 12): Change of plans. I ordered the new server yesterday and this morning it was already set up. The plan is to migrate the site over to the new server, then apply this data conversion. So for now, I am setting up the server. I cannot give a time estimation for now, but I hope to do everything today.

UPDATE (Sep 13): I had quite a few problems yesterday, so I did not get the site moved. I have however moved the site now, but still not done the encoding fix. I will do that within the next couple of days.

UPDATE (Sep 22): The database is now converted to unicode. It seems to be working.

~Keep on Mooseing,
Ralle