November 13, 2006
Tech Support Almost Ruined Me
(This is what my website looked like for an hour and half!)
Ah, why is tech support so bad sometimes? I was trying to get this script on my site to work so I can track incoming traffic. It hasn’t been working for over a week so I decided to email tech support. He wrote me back around 30min later and thru email we tried to troubleshoot my site for about twenty minutes.
Eventually he said “Can you try one more thing? Please change your charset from utf-8 to something else” like UTF-7. So I listened and changed my option to UTF-7, then I looked at my site and everything was messed up. So I did what I always do when something doesn�t work, I changed it back.
This is when it gets good. After changing it back, I took another look at the site and nothing changed. I went back to the options and it defaulted back to UTF-7. After about 30 tries with no success I decided to email the tech support guy to help me out. Then the weirdest thing happened. HE NEVER REPLIED even though we were exchanging emails every 2 minutes for 35 minutes.
I was all by myself on this one and my site was all messed up. Then I tried researching the issue and found something on a Wordpress support forum. A guy was having the same problem as me and ended up having to delete Wordpress and reinstalling the whole thing. He was lucky though because his website was brand new and he didn�t have any content. I was like “NO!! There must me a better way.”
When I freak out about my site, I always contact my own free tech support Taylor. Taylor, a writer for eFIPO, knows a ton of stuff about programming and investigated the problem and found this site to repair the issue. After an hour and a half the issue was fixed.
Moral of the story: If tech support ends up screwing up a problem and doesn’t respond, freak out then try to get him fired 
. Don’t ever change your UTF option!
Who is your web host? I am in search of a new one, maybe yours would be one to avoid?
Wasn’t really the hosts fault at all, it was a 3rd service company. I’ll just call them Crazy E. No that’s to obvious. C Egg. That’s better
I have the very same problem you now describe as solved. Glad you fixed it, but I just can’t sse how the page you are linking to (http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/site-url/) can solve your problem.
It just describes how to fix the site url? Well it’s not quite the issue, my issue is the char set. I have looked my database through and the url should be all right.
If you bother, please mail me and tell me exactly how you solved your problem. I’m getting quite furious …
I figured out myself.
Complete guide to fix the grim WordPress UFT-7 bug:
1. First open PhpMyAdmin, your domain host can provide you with the adress, in my case it’s http://phpmyadmin.needhost.dk/.
Login with the username and password you would have specified when creating the database.
2. A list of your databases will appear. Click the one that is your WordPress database. All the tables in your database will appear. Depending on what prefix you have specified in your wp-config.php file you should find something like wp_options. If you can’t find this table you prefix isn’t wp_. You can look op wp-config.php at the root of your wordpress directory, and find the prefix line.
example: $table_prefix = ‘anotherprefix’;
In this case the table in your database would be ilovewordpressbugsoptions.
Open the table “wp_options” or “anotherprefixoptions”.
3. Now you should look for the column named option_name. Look through the list and see if you can find an option called “blog_charset”. Typically option_id #37. If you can’t find it it’s because it’s on the next page. Click the next page button.
4. Now you have found the “blog_charset”. If you look at the value it says “UTF-7″. Because Wordpress can’t handle this we are going to change this to UTF-8. Click the pen just before the delete function to edit it.
5. Find the field where it say “UTF-7″ and change it to “UTF-8″ and press done, or whatever it’s called in your language, at the bottom of the page.
6. Thank God. You’re done!