Problem with accented characters on Apache

[Dave_77]

Hi all, my first post.

 

We have an IPB 2.3.3 forum engine, running on Apache 2.2.6, PHP 5.2.4, MySQL 5.0.24.

 

Things seem to be about 95% OK, however, there are occasional problems with posting: several members tried to post Hungarian and French characters, like

Á Í Ő Ö Ő Ű

à â ç é è ê ë î ï ô û ù ü ÿ

 

These are not getting through, and they get an error:

 

Bad Request

 

Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.

Apache/2.2.0 (Fedora) Server at Port 80

 

Members have been asked to try with Explorer, Firefox and Opera, and all get the same results. This is strange, as most Croatian and Serbian characters that are accentuated, like: č, š, ć, ž. These go through just fine, as well as Cyrillic alphabet is OK as well.

 

We asked Invision Power Board tech support, however they say that the errors are on the server end in the Apache configuration, and not IPB. Which seems logical, as before the move on the new server (I don't think the old server used to run Apache), nothing like this used to happen. They advised us that this is most probably due to mod_security module in Apache, and that we should reconfigure it somehow to let these characters through.

 

 

On a different, but possibly related note - we'd like to switch our board from iso-8859-1 charset to UTF-8. We already have about 100.000 posts in the database, so is this likely to cause any errors in these? Also, is it necessary to add the "AddDefaultCharset utf-8" setting to Apache conf? So far it is commented out, and we thought that it would be enough to go to System Setting in our Board's configuration and set the Document Character Set to "utf-8". "AddDefaultCharset utf-8" is currently commented out from our Apache conf, do you think we should uncomment it for this?

 

Thanks in advance