In a continued effort of looking at all the different odds and ends of our website, one of the issues gnawing at me was how non-latin alphabet letters suddenly disappeared off of Low End Mac, instantly converting text from multiple languages into “????”.
Today, Low End Mac restores/converted all posts dating back to 1997, over to utf8mb4_unicode_ci. This means our website may now display text in nearly all human languages, allowing greater accessibility for all readers, as well as posts including/made with non-English text.
Furthermore, we added several languages to our system/login:
- 🇩🇪 Deutsch – German – (de_DE Locale)
. - 🇪🇸 Español – Spanish – (es_ES Locale)
. - 🇫🇷 Français – French – (fr_FR Locale)
. - 🇯🇵 日本語 – Japanese – (ja Locale)
. - 🇬🇪 ქართული – Georgian – (ka_GE Locale)
. - 🇺🇦 Українська – Ukranian (uk Locale)
. - 🇷🇺 Русский – Russian – (ru_RU Locale)
. - 🇨🇳 中文 (中国) – Mandarin Chinese – (zh_CN Locale)
Before and after
For a brief time between late July and August 22nd 2026, any non-latin alphabet letters looked like “?”.
 |
 |