When you search this mod for "illegal collations", what do you see? Obviously your post is at the top, but surely you must see mine below that?

I agonized over that problem for weeks. I'm still a little pissed about it I guess, sorry. Especially if people are going to keep posting the problem even after I posted a solution for it.

There is no reason to get angry. I saw your post. Your solution requires that I backup my 450MB database, run a "search and replace" and then re-upload the 450MB database. This is an impossible solution for me. There is just no way to do that on such a large, large, large database.

Look here: http://www.phpwact.org/php/i18n/utf-8/mysql

Thank you dartho. That was very helpful. I also found that I can change the overall characterset in phpMyAdmin using the "operations" tab.

wtf... out of line a bit I might be but rest assured your sanity is safe with me...

How can someone w/ 500+ not understand the need for tact on here in regards to coders simply not understanding the inner workings of every aspect of every coding language nor the need to read 500 posts or 800 pages to find an answer that should be in the first post to begin with? - We all are trying, even the most experienced :p

Videx is not saying your db is messed up, from the admin panel disable the mod. What he should of said is your DB's collation is not the same, just like the error reads:

Note the red.

Now you can try changing the collation via phpmyadmin if you have that or another alternative. Backup your DB before doing anything in any editor etc. If it works fine then uninstall the currently disabled mod, leave any files if present but install it again via the product etc, then it should work.

S-MAN

I'm not sure why you feel there's no way to restore your db (I assume you're backing it up regardless).

But if that's the case, I also gave a link to a programmatic solution. However, that was taking forever for me as it would fail every few lines, and taking the time to make the corrections manually got onerous really fast.

Erm ... you don't have to dump the whole database just to fix a couple illegal collations.

just take a look at your DB, find out which collation is being used most often, adjust the new tables/fields that generate error accordingly and you're done.

You almost make that sound easy. But where were you when I was trying to fix mine? I would have gladly given you access to adjust these fields for me. :)

Fact is, in my case about 80 tables were different collations, and after sitting down one day and manually changing each one in PHPMyAdmin, I discovered that only changes the tables, not the fields within! A real PITA that hadn't bothered me at all until I tried to install this mod.

am I limited to editing only these templates? :(

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2009/04/21.png

I'm trying to edit showthread through TMS.

EDIT: I just read that I can onyl use TMS on templates I already edit so if I already manually edit the template I want why am I also adding that edits in TMS? I'm confused.

and do I always have to edit manually first to make it appear in the drop down list of TMS then change the one I manually edited back to the default and then add the edits in TMS? Someone share me how you do it.

In your Template Modifications Manager, select Add Template-Modification under the MASTER STYLE dropdown box. This allows you to create the template edit for all styles without actually manually editing any template beforehand.