Blank page - White Screen when not logged in - SMF 2.0.19

[btechnix]

Hello,

Following the update of an SMF 2.0.11 forum to 2.0.19 with large upgrade, and I had the problem similar to the one described here:  https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=573899.0 namely: A blank page is displayed instead of the home page forum for non-connected guests. If you are connected everything is perfect.
With or without mods, the situation remains the same

After several tests, I noticed that the problem appears if you use a UTF8 language ( i.e : English-UTF8 or French-UTF8). With an ISO language (English, French) the problem disappears, but of course the display of special characters such as accentuations no longer works and is replaced by either ? i.e. the 2 bytes of the utf8 encoding.

I then installed a new empty forum in version 2.0.19 with a database in ' utf8_general_ci' , which did not this blank page problem does not appear.
Then, after saving this functional database, I imported only the data from the previous database to this new database, which again caused the same empty page situation when not connected.

I then compared the contents of this database, and in particular the (smf_)settings table, with the blank database saved previously. I then identified that the variable global_character_set containing the value 'UTF-8' does not exist in the database resulting from the migration.
After adding this variable, the home page in guest mode is visible again.

I am posting this message to share with the community my experience in resolving this very annoying problem.

[Kindred]

Yes... if you were attempting to use utf8 but did not actually convert your system to use utf8, then things will not display as they should.

That's not a bug...  it's a misconfiguration.

[Steve]

Sorry @Kindred for the move earlier. Wasn't sure where it should be ... I guess if I'm not sure, I should leave it.

[Kindred]

No worries