Reporting an odd issue linked to obsolete encoding

Hello,

An important precision: this is NOT a cry for help, and NOT a rant. Purely, a rare bug report.

Simply, I observed a behaviour that could be called anomalous, and I think the wp-discuz developers may be interested in knowing, “just in case”, and there’s also the possibility that some people may have the same problem and may find this post with a web search.

So: this bug report is to report of something that should only happen very, very, very rarely. Comments not loading for some people in their browers. Not a CSS issue, no, simply, in the discussion below wordpress posts, there would be the titles, but not the comments’ text. And yet the comments do exist, almost everybody else sees them, and the persons who don’t see them still get the email to tell them they got replies and all.

I couldn’t reproduce it myself, and I don’t know the specifics of the people who had the problem (browser, etc).

However, the origin of the problem has been found: the wp_comments table in obsolete latin1, migrated into a newer server with mariadb instead of mysql as database engine, and UTF-8mb4 as the system default.
An ALTER TABLE in PhpMyAdmin converting the wp_comments table to UTF8-MB4 was enough to fix the problem.

ALTER TABLE
    wp_comments
    CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4
    COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

There, report done.

I doubt anyone else will have had this problem (importing an antiquated latin1 database, onto a newer Debian Buster with mariadb, seriously? Anything created over this decade has already been in UTF-8), but , again, “just in case”, here, the report has been done, that fixes non-loaded wpdiscuz-managed comments texts.

Have a good day everyone!
(final time: this topic is not a rant, not a call for help, I was just reporting findings that implied wp-discuz, and provided a fix.)