Issue: Not showing Japanese characters correctly in "My Activity"

fixed, it is HTML Character Set in vB's language manager, change it to UTF8

If you already have forum content, changing the forum character set could cause the same problem with other forum posts that were already posted if you do not run any scripts to convert your existing content to UTF8.

It is possible that we overlooked the necessity of character set conversion for content appearing in vBulletin's activity stream, which is a bug we would have to address on our end.

There are actually quite a few instances were conversion is not handled appropriately, mainly when it comes to links (as you pointed out). The best way for us to address this issue going forward is with new template functions wrapping each use, rather than trying to guess which fields will be used from the PHP side. Such a solution would be employed during 4.1.x which is currently in Alpha, so the perfect time.

This situation is "fixed" in Alpha 3 by attempting to convert activity stream contents back to the character set of the currently-viewed language. When a character does not exist, it is now correctly replaced with a "?" rather than garbage characters.

Alpha 3 also makes available a curly template function which can be used in any other locations that are discovered over time, or in future locations as needed.

For your case, the title and link to the Japanese wiki page will still be broken in the activity stream even if you eventually upgrade to Alpha 3. If your forum uses Japanese characters, you should change your ISO-8859-1 in your language settings to an ISO-8859 compatible Japanese character set like 2022-JP, which should correct the activity stream issue (starting in Alpha 3) without also breaking content your users have already posted.

If you use other characters too (such as Russian characters), then your only option would be to convert your forum to UTF-8. That process is not as simple as changing the forum language setting, as you actually have to convert every value already saved to your database to UTF-8 (not the same as changing the database column's collation to UTF-8, or the database character set to UTF-8). My understanding is that you are currently storing ISO-8859-1 encoded data in UTF-8 fields; you would want to store UTF-8 encoded data in UTF-8 fields. If you go that route, do NOT include VaultWiki data in the conversion.

wow...thanks its very detailed, also it sounds very troublesome haha

My forum is not ready for public yet, it is still a test site
I could reinstall it anytime.

I need UTF8,
and if memory serves, we don't get to choose HTML Character Set during vB installation, right?
I would rather reinstall the forum, it seems to be easier for me.

If you are starting your forum from scratch, start with vBulletin 4 (not 3, it's not UTF-8 compatible). vB4 will start you with a UTF-8 database. After installing, make sure to set UTF-8 in the language options.

If you install any additional language packs, you might have issues. You will need to find packs that are already UTF-8.

This will ensure that you can use any characters you want anywhere without issues.

Oh then it looks like I don't have to reinstall the forum,
because I am using vB4, and I don't care about the existing forum posts, they're all for testing.
it is fine as long as new posts work properly