Hi @AndrewGearhart,
The difference in databases that you’ve noted is indeed the culprit. A long time ago, MySQL databases had a Latin1 default, and recent distros etc. correctly use UTF8. To fix this, you’ll need to work with mysql/mysqldump rather than with OJS’s configuration files. I’d encourage you to work with the MySQL client as well to ensure that, independent of OJS, the content in the database is the format it is supposed to be. See e.g. Convert mysql database from latin1 to utf8 the RIGHT way | Dan Collis-Puro (I haven’t tried this but at a glance it looks like the problem you’re trying to solve).
Once you have everything in your database correctly UTF-8 encoded, the recommended settings for OJS are here: An unexpected error has occurred. Please reload the page and try again. POPUP - #8 by asmecher
Be careful not to accept any new content while your encoding is garbled; if you get a few encodings mixed together, it’ll be very hard to disentangle.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team