Problems with special characters for Member Names (e.g. é à ç etc)

[XrossGG]

For a really long time we’re trying to find a solution to an incredibly irritating problem. Every time someone registers for a BuddyPress account on our site with a first or last name that has one or more special characters, it changes that character to a string of other characters. Like Céline becomes something like C006feline. The same goes for ç é à ü etc. Since our site is in Europe, many French, Spanish, German and other members are seeing their names being messed up upon registration. They become confused because they don't know why that happens. Since we don't people to change their names they also send us emails about it, so it costs us a lot of time.

I’m becoming so incredibly frustrated with this issue because it’s been going on for well one year now, without any solution in sight. I have a great development team with real expert and I host with WPengine. Both their teams have wasted so many hours on it that I estimate “my damage” already going up to €2000 (no kidding). Who knows what to do before I’m just going totally nuts here…? 🙁

Thanks for your kind help!

[espellcaste]

I failed to replicate this problem. My community is in Brazilian Portuguese and we have similar characters as you. But we don't have his type of problem.

So I'm not so sure it is a BuddyPress issue. :/

[DJPaul]

Check your database table's encoding and character sets. If this site is older than a few years, the BuddyPress database tables won't be utf8 (I think they started out as latin1, due to a bug we had years and years ago) and nowadays they should be utf8mb4.