jc93, I had the same problem and just sorted it out. It’s been two months since your post, and I guess you might have found the answer already, but I’ll type the answer here anyway.
Apparently it’s a collation(encoding) setting thing in the bdd_bb_xxx (bdd_bb_posts, bdd_bb_topics, bdd_bb_forums, etc) tables. If you you use phpMyAdmin, you can select the table and then go to the “Structure” tab. In the “Collation” column, your table is probably set to something like ‘latin1_swedish_ci’. Click the edit button, and then change it to ‘utf8_general_ci’. You probably need to change all of columns with the wrong collations in all the bdd_bb_xxx tables, however, bdd_bb_posts and bdd_bb_topics are the main two tables. After you have done the change, your can use Simplified Chinese in all the new posts, but this WON’T fix your old posts, as their data has been corrupted since you entered it at the first time and cannot be fixed by any means.
You should be able to use sql query ‘alter table alter column …’ to achieve the same result.
