[BillB1]

Originally Posted by socialteenz

Create a blank index.php file to your root to prevent your files from appearing on the root (https://dantdubai.org)

Sure thing, and thanks for the heads-up

--------------- Added [DATE]1645404853[/DATE] at [TIME]1645404853[/TIME] ---------------

Updating the topic in case someone faces a similar Charset issue with non english language.
After going through so many suggestions, forums, and stackoverflow
especially this Hell of Latin1 vs. utf8 arguments, I feel silly.

The reason why I had all these ?????? and Gibberish characters was the very Locale
setting on the Centos7 server.

This is how it was solved:
logged in as root> terminal
# yum update
# localectl status
checked the system locale:
# cat /etc/locale.conf
list available locale on server:
# localectl list-locales | grep en_
pick AR support locale:
# localectl set-locale LANG=<<locale_name>>
and confirm
# localectl status.

Then I importing the same OLD Latin1 database charset and collation.
Since Arabic is not my language, I copied several pages worth of global phrases from xampp
and pasted them into global phrases on the host, charset is just fine!
https://dantdubai.org/vb/

Still not out of the woods yet, Next step:
Restore about 90.000 users with 1.3 million posts.
I'll stay with vb3.8 to see if impex is up to the task.
Had anyone tried impex to selectively import some tables and exclude old styles, language pack, outdated mods etc?