We do have a itsybitsy problem with Typo3 which appeared the first time this morning. It was an agency that put up our Website in 2016 with 6.2 of Typo3… yes I know… it has never been updated since then… don’t ask me why, i’m new to this. Anyways.
Unfortunately the agency doesn’t exist anymore and we’re devistated to find help in this one. I do have minor experience with HTML, CSS and PHP but I’m more the creative head and we don’t have a IT specialist in our house. So i really hope for your help community… this is what we got: www.ask-klebstoffe.de
Uncaught TYPO3 Exception
#1389697515: It looks like the character set utf8 is not used for this connection even though it is configured as connection charset. This TYPO3 installation is using the $GLOBALS[‘TYPO3_CONF_VARS’][‘SYS’][‘setDBinit’] property with the following value: “”. Please make sure that this command does not overwrite the configured charset. Please note that for the TYPO3 database everything other than utf8 is unsupported since version 4.7. (More information)
As there is no support for this old TYPO3 version you probably changed nothing to your system.
TYPO3 assumes a bad character coding, which might be in the database or could result from a bad initialization-string.
Use a tool to inspect the database and whether character coding (collation) is set to utf8 (something like utf8_unicode_ci) on all levels (database, tables, fields). Save a backup before you change anything!
You either need a forced charset ( $GLOBALS[‘TYPO3_CONF_VARS’][‘SYS’][‘setDBinit’]or valid collations in the database.
(if only the DBinit string was used to store UTF8 data you might see invalid characters in the DB if you use a proper DB-Tool)
You might resume your sysem (file storage and database) to a backup timed from before the error.
This all could be caused from a hacker attack to your system as your TYPO3 version is probably vulnerable to different security issues which doesn’t got fixed because your version receives no longer support.
Thank you very much for the detailed description. I can actually work with that information you provided so now we can go for further steps and see if we can solve this by ourselves… we do indeed know that this version is a huge gate for attacks, so that idea isn’t that absurd… we already work on a completely new website, but hoped that we could leave the old one as it is just to provide informations to the customer…