In the wee hours of Friday morning (today), pcweenies.net went down. I woke up at 5AM (as I am wont to do on Fridays) to see an Internal Server Error.
The log files mentioned something along the lines of:
17-Aug-2008 21:09:10] WordPress database error Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation (blahblahblah)
I’ve googled about, but haven’t found a clear answer to what might have caused the error. My best guess is that the collations were changed from utf8_general_ci to latin1_swedish_ci. How could this have happened?
Thanks in advance!
-Krishna
Too much Swedish aquavit? And that at 5 am?
Hope that teached you a lesson.
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Good luck finding the culprit, cheers.
:-)
Have you tried going into the Database itself and changing the Charset on that particular table to utf8_general?
Is the collation of that table/field changed?
If so can you change it back?
If the collation is not changed it can be an input error from the browser.
Normally the page/HTTP-header informs the browser what encoding to use, but this is changeable by the user and can result in an error like this one.
But than still the database server must rejected the input in the first place…
Is the error on an blogs table or reactions table?
Only thing I can think of *why* it could have been changed is an upgrade of your MySQL on the server (presuming you are not hosting the site yourself) which may have reset some collations which had not been explicitedly defined. The MYSQL default is latin1_swedish_ci.
If you would like some more information on MySQL character set and collation issues, this article may help you: http://www.adviesenzo.nl/examples/php_mysql_charset_fix/