vCharset Converter is the first ever converting tool for databases, and here is a brief history:
On May 11th 2005, Kier had announced the vBulletin 3.5 series.

One of the major additions was the AJAX Integration, and it was a great improvement in vBulletin itself.

AJAX uses JavaScript and features of recent browsers to allow additional data to be retrieved without doing a page refresh, such as posting with quick reply or editing a thread title inline.

After releasing of vB 3.5.0 Gold, some vBulletiners complained from notifications emails that couldn’t be read. those emails contained the letters as entities.

The fact was that any non-English data transfered between the server and the browser from the browser to the server via AJAX was converted into entities, and it was inserted to the database as entities as well.

Entities are shown well in HTML pages, but not in the plain text, in the database and in the notification emails.

And it said, AJAXian features cause problems with boards not running in English, and a new setting had been introduced in 3.5.1 to “Disable Problematic AJAX Features”.

These features may cause problems with boards not running in English. You may use this setting to disable all AJAX features or just the ones problematic with non-English boards.

The Syrian Medical Society Forum encoding was windows-1256. It was very sad to disable those new AJAXian features. and I decided to built vCharset Converter to convert my database encoding to UTF-8 which is supported well by AJAX.

And now I’m getting full advantages of AJAXian features.

I used vCC to convert to UTF-8, and I believe I’ll use it again, someday in the future to convert to more advanced character set like UTF-16.

what a happy story, isn’t it?

note: quotes are from ACP of vBulletin.