Damn Chinese Characters

I finally got around to upgrading the user forum at SCAD‘s Chinese Student Association website the other day. I got fed up with phpBB last year after Lawrence and I were endlessly patching the damn forum for security and spam breaches. Thank god he found Simple Machines Forum (or SMF for short) and we’ve been happily using SMF ever since. For one thing, SMF runs a lot faster and cleaner with a lot more useful features came included in the base install. And additional mods were in the form of plugins and add-ons. And even then, I can easily find AND install plugins/themes from within the control panel! Under phpBB, installing mods means literally opening up half a dozen files (sometimes more) at a time and manually add codes to the base install, which is extremely unsanitary, messy and makes version upgrades a pain in the ass.

One of the legacies that phpBB left after the migration was lack of support of UTF-8 Unicode standard for Chinese character sets. As a result, the damn forum is unreadable if a visitor happens to be on a machine without the appropriate character sets installed. Worse, we have had to support both Simplified and Traditional Chinese, which is a real pain because by selecting one character set means making the other unreadable.

So when I upgraded the SMF forum, I tried converting the entire database from a dirty mix of Big5 and GB Chinese character sets into UTF-8, but something went wrong in the prepackaged SMF UTF-8 conversion tool. And the all the Chinese characters were made into garbage text! Thank goodness SMF made a backup during the upgrade and I was able to fully recover every piece of content.

I guess I will try again the next time SMF releases an upgrade.

The next big thing for the site is to seamlessly integrate some kind of content management system and a wiki so that a single login session session can be used on everything else. This has proved to be a lot tougher than it sounds so far. A couple of kids tried remaking the site as their “independent study” projects. But at the end, that was all it was — a project. The designer-types made the whole site (minus the forum, which is my domain) in HTML, which made updating nearly impossible. That then perpetuates into nobody wants to learn how to mess with the HTML content. Hopefully a wiki and an easy-to-use management tool will make things easier when I get around to doing it…

The site has grown in importance over the years. It’s so far still an “underground” organization as far as SCAD is concerned (or else we’d be shut down by now). But personally, I think the damn site is responsible in recruiting at least 80% of potential Chinese-speaking kids who eventually end up at SCAD. And for that, maybe SCAD oughta pay for the hosting!