[Paul Wong-Gibbs]

The problem is that they need to be the same (ideally, utf8) – this gives the ??? problem.

I’ve just done a test install and it’s installed the databases with these types.

If you look on the bb-config.php in the root directory of your site, I bet the “charset” is set to “UTF” — but the database tables are still installed as latin1.

The forums component is probably the weakest area of my BuddyPress knowledge. I’ve had a look at the code and I can’t see anything obviously wrong. I’ll let you know once I have news.