Design issue Import problem: Passwords with umlauts and special characters

[twollert]

After importing data from vBulletin 4 the members who used umlauts (äöü) and/or special characters (ß) in their passwords can't log in anymore. The strange thing: The 'password" table collation is "latin1_swedish_ci" in vBulletin 4, although the language of the forum is German not Swedish. (I think the problem happens while converting from "latin1_swedish_ci" to "utf8_general_ci".)

I used the vB4 importer 1.47.

Any ideas?

 

[Paul B]

Are they able to log in using the standard versions of the same characters?

Otherwise they can try using the reset password form.

 

[twollert]

With "standard versions" you mean e.g. "a" instead of "ä"? No, that's not possible.

 

[Paul B]

Yes, that's what I meant.

The next step then is to try the password reset form.

You should also post on the 4.x importer thread to let the author know of the issue.

 

[Mike]

This is sort of tricky because technically speaking, the characters in the password aren't actually the special characters, due to the client-side hashing that vB does. They're likely not actually characters that you can type.

Unfortunately, it's not something that we can workaround. The only option is to reset the password for those users.

 

[Benjy]

I can confirm that the problem also occured to me with a vB3 import. All the passwords that have special characters have to be reset.