Column reverted to non-unicode

A while ago I had to fix various columns in CB tables that didn't support unicode ( foreign language characters ).

ALTER TABLE #_groupjive_groups  MODIFY name text CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

It has been working fine for many, many months but today I just noticed the column reverted back to its original collation "latin1_swedish_ci", losing all the Thai names I had stored in there.

How did this happen?  How to stop it from happening again?

We don't touch collation. On install of a plugin when its database is created the collation will be whatever your database default collation is. You should be sure all your tables are set to utf8mb4_unicode_ci then be sure your database itself is configured properly by changing the default collation of your database.

I have not changed the database default character set, so if a column is recreated, it will get the default.  Perhaps there are some other situations too, of which I am unaware, where the collation is reset. (Mariadb on Linux)

But the plot thickens. I changed collation of both name and description in that table - and the description collation hasn't changed! It's not something my hosting provider would have done to me, as it happened on both local and hosted sites when I did the last CB upgrade.

 

The easiest fix is to fix your default collation in your database. The default is probably set to latin1_swedish_ci.

will do. thanks.