Dear list members we've recently installed OTRS version 6.0.8 (Community Edition) on a Debian Linux system9.4 with MySQL-/Maria-DB 15.1 and Apache Webserver 2.4.25 as well as Perl 5, version 24. The installation process went fine until we reached the point to initialize OTRS' database with CGI-Skript installer.pl. The installer reports: "Wrong database collation (character_set_database is utf8mb4, but it needs to be utf8)." The default character encoding on MySQL-/Maria-DB is: MariaDB [(none)]> SHOW VARIABLES WHERE Variable_name LIKE 'character\_set\_%' OR Variable_name LIKE '%collation%'; +--------------------------+--------------------+ | Variable_name | Value | +--------------------------+--------------------+ | character_set_client | utf8mb4 | | character_set_connection | utf8mb4 | | character_set_database | utf8mb4 | | character_set_filesystem | binary | | character_set_results | utf8mb4 | | character_set_server | utf8mb4 | | character_set_system | utf8 | | collation_connection | utf8mb4_general_ci | | collation_database | utf8mb4_general_ci | | collation_server | utf8mb4_general_ci | +--------------------------+--------------------+ Do we get rid of this error by setting character_set_database to utf8 only? In the past we encountered problems with new e-mail that comes into the OTRS ticket system and contains nasty emoticons in the subject line: as a result the OTRS system refuses to import any email anymore. So we do think it is useful to keep the utf8mb4 encoding in the database because with this encoding the database is capable to handle the incoming emoticons in subject line. Best regards, Markus -- OTRS-Administration Universität Konstanz Kommunikations-, Informations-, Medienzentrum (KIM) Abteilungen KIM-Basisdienste, KIM-Support 78457 Konstanz, Deutschland