Quoting Big Brother ignorance.is.strength@gmail.com:
Ok, I'm fairly sure I did this an unconventional way. Please don't rail if you find I did something very... stupid.
Our current software is Scoop. We've already transferred all the stories and comment information without problem.
I wrote all the scripts to do this. For the users I simply studied both tables on the DBs and then figured out what I had to transfer and where to put everything. Then I wrote the script based on that. As I said earlier, everything works fine but this.
As for versions. Php4 all around. The old Scoop database used to be on a server that was using MySql 3, but has been transferred to a new server which uses MySql 5. Is that enough to affect the encoding somehow in a way I can't or couldn't detect?
Ah, MySql-3 and MySql-5 handle the strings differently. Make sure all your string columns are utf8-unicode-ci. Make sure you save the strings as utf8 encoded. You might wish to study or even use the user_save[1] function for your scripts.
[1] http://api.drupal.org/api/function/user_save/5
Earnie -- http://for-my-kids.com/ -- http://give-me-an-offer.com/