Newbie alert. I have a single table in the only database on my hosted domain for a medium-sized non-profit organization. The table contains the list of members and their relevant data. To manage the database I installed and customized a php/mysql shareware application. To regulate member access I assign them a user name based on their last and first names and a password which is the membership identification number the organization assigns to them. It has been in place for about eight months, so far, so good. With one exception...I have received multiple complaints from users all over the world that they cannot gain access to their data using their assigned usernames and passwords. After many emails back and forth, I usually end up resetting their usernames and passwords to some simple three or four letter substitues. Whenever I use their originally assigned usernames and passwords, I have no trouble. I am well aware of the many foolish ways in which user commit obvious errors, and I am always alert to these possibilities. But there have simply been too many complaints, and they are always resolved when I simplify the username/password combination. I do not understand the collation/character set issues very well at all, but isn't it possible that there is a problem with this, that results in the username/password evaluation process getting screwed up? The MySQL charset is UTF-8 Unicode (utf8), the MySQL connection collation is utf8_unicode_ci. However the one table shows a latin1_swedish_ci collation. Shouldn't the table's collation be the same as the connection collation -- UTF-8? Thanks! Frank
