A maths forum with broken encoding and missing formulas

A Romanian mathematics forum came out of a server move with corrupted characters and no formula rendering. I repaired it, upgraded it from phpBB 2.0.22, and kept it on the same URLs.

The objective

A previous move from Plesk to cPanel had left the board showing Romanian diacritics as replacement characters, and the mathematical formulas that were the whole point of the site had stopped rendering.

The encoding problem wasn't a configuration value. The configured encoding was already correct, which meant the damage was in the stored data itself, or in how it was being read.

The forum also ranked in search, so the URLs after the upgrade had to match the ones from before it.

What I did

I traced the character corruption to the data rather than the settings, and converted the stored text to the correct encoding.

I upgraded the board from phpBB 2.0.22 to the current phpBB 3 release.

I built and installed MimeTeX on the server so the formulas rendered again.

I mapped the old URL structure onto the new one so existing links and search results kept working.

I worked on a local copy first and demonstrated it to the client before they gave me access to the live server.

The result

The board came back with readable Romanian text, working formulas, a supported phpBB version, and its search rankings intact.