[solved]Help needed (font issue and some other stuff)

[thatsme]

Hi there
I hope everyone is in good mood
I'm looking for help with my blog (www.predvidenie.com)
As you can see it's unreadable now (suppose to be in Russian). It's happened about a week ago, before that everything was fine for several years at least.
I've upgraded the blog from 2.3.5 to 2.4 - didn't help. I changed PHP from 7.4.30 to 8.0 - didn't help and on the top of it the blog returned a bunch of critical errors.
I tried to change settings with language wherever I could find any option including DB - it was useless. I suspect that the issue raised on the server side, but before I call them I want to make sure that I cannot fix it.
I'm far from being an advanced user with coding, so if you know how to fix it please tell me step by step procedure how it goes.
And there is another question, not so urgent though.
As I understand some of the plugins aren't compatible with PHP8.
Here is the list of what I have -
Event plagins:
1. Markup: Serendipity
2. Markup: Emocticate
3. Sam protector
4. Spartacus
5, Start page Category
6. Property/Templates of Categories
7. Photoblog Entries
8. CKEditor
9. Markup:Textile
10. Extended property of entries
11. Static pages
12. Serenity Autoupdate
13. Spam Chalenge/Response
14. Tunbnail page
15. Category assignment
16. Extended options for media manager
17. Template editor
18. Links to next/previous entry
19. Lightbox for entry images
20. Markup: include entry data/templates/blocks
21. Templates Header/Logo images

Sidebar plugins:
1.Calendar (hidden)
2. Blog Administration (hidden)
3. Categories
4. HTNL Nugget
5. Sidebar Logo

Could you tell me which of them is obsolete now?
Thanks, I much appreciate for any respond. Blessed day to everyone!

[erAck]

That's a broken character encoding. Looks like octets of UTF-8 encoding being encoded again in UTF-8, so twice. Check your database that it's setup with at least utf8mb3 or utf8mb4 and content is indeed stored in UTF-8, i.e. readable when using phpMyAdmin or such. Tricky thing is it can go wrong at the server, database, table, column or string literal levels.

[thatsme]

Thank you for clarification!
So what do you think would be the best way to fix it - downgrade the previous version of the blog and then reinstall the newest one again? call to provider and ask for restoration of my site from like a week ago(if they still keep it)? upload backup of previous version of database?
For me that's strange that english part of the table is ok and russian part is corrupted. BTW, database is unreadable with any coding also.
I'm just thinking to rebuild the site and replace all the text documents with PDF or MS Office version. Well, all the navigation links of the blog are still unreadable, so it would be a partial solution..
Thank you again!

[erAck]

If "database is unreadable with any coding", for Cyrillic that may even be the case if the encoding is correct but you see the raw octet-values, because all characters are encoded. Of course the English characters are readable because they don't need to be encoded in UTF-8 and would survive even a double encoding. Hard to say what actually is the situation without seeing the real underlying string values. Can you paste here the content of the first sentence of http://www.predvidenie.com/index.php?/a ... -2011.html as verbatim code block as you get it from the database using phpMyAdmin or such?

If this brokenness was already before your upgrade (you said "I've upgraded the blog from 2.3.5 to 2.4 - didn't help" so I assume so) then fiddling with downgrading won't change anything. Likely the underlying database was changed and some data export/import/update went astray. If so, then ask your hosting provider what they did, but now with all your changes it's hard to point at them and say they did something wrong.. Maybe restoring database and S9y to an earlier date would work, but this is all guessing around.

[thatsme]

Unfortunately I wasn't able to find this file on my site. I called to support, they restored the site from backup of 08/08/2022 and restored DB accordingly, but nothing changed, it still unreadable.
That's a pain in the neck..

[thatsme]

Ok, here is what I've recognized.
1. When I copy-paste those symbols to Notepad++ as ANSI and then encode it for UTF-8, the text becomes readable in Russian (with rare mistakes) .
2. When I enter the encoded text back to the Entry and save it, the site returns a block of question marks instead of the text.
Can it help to localize where the real issue is?
Thank you!
(Thanks God, now at least I can restore some important text documents..)

[erAck]

If you save readable text and it's en-/decoded wrongly then likely the database (or at its tables or columns) has a wrong encoding setting; as said it should be utf8mb3 (or maybe utf8mb4 but not necessarily). Again, you could inspect the database content of such entry (and its encoding setting) with phpMyAdmin or similar database admin tool, but as you said "I wasn't able to find this file on my site" you seem to have no experience at all with that. From a distance everything we can do is guess around. You should really talk to your hosting provider and have them inspect the situation. They should know or find out. If they don't then they aren't worth their money.

[thatsme]

Thank you, it sounds like a good advice. Tomorrow I will call them again and try to make them to figure out what is wrong with that.
I've found the database, opened it with phpMyAdmin, made a dump of it, but the file which was mentioned just wasn't there. The encoding is set as UTF8mb4, but when I tried to change it for another coding (I tried many of them) nothing actually would happened.
So I've decided to put aside the playing with the DB for the very end because, as you noticed, my experience with programming is neglectable and I don't want to mess with it..

[erAck]

If encoding is already set to UTF8mb4 then do not try with other encodings.
Check in your s9y Settings -> Configuration whether Enable DB-charset conversion is on or off and try the opposite.

[thatsme]

Thank you brother, it seems like I've found the way to resolve the issue.
After giving them a call they redirected me to Word Press, even though I have nothing to do with it. So I realized that there is no way I could fix it and I decided to make a radical step - I changed my plan from essential (because it's limited to one project only) to business one and installed whole new site from the scratch.
Btw, it was a great intellectual exercise
I did it like a dozen of times and I learned a lot of new stuff about S9y, DB and HTML. Today I've finally got an acceptable variant and relaxed. It's not done yet but thanks God there will be no more struggle with it. Step by step I will restore and refresh it.
I want to thank you again for willing to help me, I really appreciate it.
The topic can be closed now.
God bless!