Symptoms

After changing the Confluence encoding under the Confluence General > Formatting and International Settings from UTF-8 to UTF-16, the application starts to show only asian characters, as the screenshot below:

Cause

UTF-16 is not supported:  CONF-35275 - Getting issue details... STATUS

Affected Confluence sites will return a different UTF encoding inside the result of:

SELECT BANDANAVALUE FROM BANDANA where BANDANAKEY = 'atlassian.confluence.settings';

Resolution

1. Shut down Confluence and perform a database backup.

2. Run:

   UPDATE  BANDANA set BANDANAVALUE = REPLACE(BANDANAVALUE, 'UTF-16', 'UTF-8') where BANDANAKEY = 'atlassian.confluence.settings';

3. Start Confluence