What MySQL Database Collation should I choose, and why?
Sincerely,
Debbie
The more I read, the more confused I become…
It seems like these days everyone says, “Use UTF-8”, but I don’t even know what that means?!
When I click on my database in phpMyAdmin, I see Collation = latin1_swedish_ci
All of this came up today because I had to re-create two tables, and during that process I saw a field for colation
I sense this is a MAJOR topic in and of itself… 
What I do know is this…
1.) I am in the U.S.
2.) My website only supports English
3.) All of my Regular Expressions in PHP have very limited character sets (e.g. [a-z0-9_.-] )
At the same time, I don’t want to be overly restrictive to International Visitors when it comes to things like…
- Posting Comments
- Sending PM’s
Not sure what to do, but I figured NOW is a better time to ask, versus after I have 10,000 users on my website!!! 
Sincerely,
Debbie