WarcraftRealms.com

Rollie wrote:Hello Russian folks -

An update on the current status of things.

Today I spent a fair amount of time looking into what it will take to get Russian data processing and such. Unfortunately, this is looking to be something that will be a huge pain the butt.

Basically, due to the charset required to correctly store, compare and display Cyrillic characters, at the least, I would have to dump and recreate the database using the proper charset (UTF-8). The default charset (latin1) was used pretty much everywhere on the server, including the database, and that is the problem.

Dumping and recreating the database is not a small undertaking. The database has grown to monstrous sizes and a dump and reload at this point takes DAYS. Even worse, there are further nuances that could prove to be even more troublesome to get right.

Another potential solution will be to slice off and do a whole subsite just for Russian players. It would mean basically recreating the site solely for Cyrillic character sets.

This again isn't a trivial task and I have to weigh the risk vs. reward. I could spend all this time and effort making the site work for other charsets (could also include Chinese, Korean, etc) only to find out that very few people would even use the new abilities.

I am going to continue looking into it, but I just wanted to make folks aware of the problems with supporting different charsets and impart that it is not as simple as just adding some new server names to the database.