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12Jan/090

Problems with charset on vbulletin

Either if special chars arent displayed corectly when you submit a new thread or when you use Rss Feed Manager you should look into :

Language / Charset Problems - Things To Check
Some people encounter problems with garbled characters when using vBulletin with non-English languages. Here are some things you can check based on my experience troubleshooting these problems:
I mention this solution i found on vbulletin forums
1. Make sure your HTML charset is appropriate to your forum language:

Admin CP -> Languages & Phrases -> Language Manager -> [Edit Settings] -> HTML Character Set

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2. Also try emptying the blank character stripper:

Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> Censorship Options -> Blank Character Stripper

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3. Also, the line wrapper can sometimes cause problems with multi-byte languages:

Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> Thread Display Options (showthread) -> Number of Characters Before Wrapping Text

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4. Also, the "prevent shouting" feature can cause problems for some non-English languages. Try disabling it:

Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> Message Posting and Editing Options -> Prevent 'SHOUTING'

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5. You might also need to set the MySQL charset in your includes/config.php file by uncommenting this line. This setting was added starting with 3.5.x:

//    ****** MySQLI OPTIONS *****
// When using MySQL 4.1+, MySQLi should be used to connect to the database.
// If you need to set the default connection charset because your database
// is using a charset other than latin1, you can set the charset here.
// If you don't set the charset to be the same as your database, you
// may receive collation errors.  Ignore this setting unless you
// are sure you need to use it.
// $config['Mysqli']['charset'] = 'utf8';

6) Also make sure your database collations are appropriate and consistent throughout the entire database. You need to use program like phpmyadmin to view your collations:

http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/index.php

When you click your database name in phpmyadmin it will list all tables, their collations, as well as the collation of the database itself at the bottom. And when you click the name of a table on the left it will list the collations of individual fields within that table.

1) To edit the collation of the database itself you need to click the database name on the left and then click "Operations" on the top.

2) To edit the collation of an individual table you need to click its name on the left and then click "Operations" on the top.

3) To edit the collation of an individual field within a table you need to click the table name on the left and then click the edit image (a little pencil icon) for that field.

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7)  If there was a database move involved then you might need to specify the character set when making the dump. This guide shows how:

http://wiki.refbase.net/index.php/Troubleshooting

Note their example:

mysqldump refbase -u root -p --opt --default-character-set=latin1 > refbase.sql

1Jan/080

SEO your v3 Arcade plugin

As you may know v3 Arcade has NO SEO so in a age where everyone is looking for seo tools i made some small modifications on the script's template in order to make unique descriptions and titles, also haven't forgot about the keywords.

Templates that sufferd modifications :

arcade_main Modification for arcade_main
arcade_play Modification for arcade_play

This modifications were tested on vbulletin 3.6.5 and v3 arcade. You can see live demo at this address : http://www.craiova-online.ro/arcade.php

The new templates are attached to the article. Just replace the old templates with the new ones

What have i done? i removed the $headinclude and <title> from each template and replaced with meta description, meta keywords and titles to best suit the page.

BTW dont forget to ajust the mods to suit your forum by replacing the words marked with red

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=$stylevar[charset]" />
<meta name="generator" content="vBulletin $vboptions[templateversion]" />
<meta name="keywords" content="$game[catname],
list of keywords" />
<meta name="description" content="$game[catname]
description $foruminfo[forumdescription] " />
<title>
title $game[catname] - YourForum </title>

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