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Hello,

I have a question regarding european sets. I've added a few (hockey) ones and intend to keep adding more, but am encountering a little problem. KHL sets of the Sereal brand typically have card numbers that start with three letters, even for base set cards. For the 2012-13 set, it wasn't a problem, but for the 2011-12 set, it is, because card numbers were actually spelled in cyrillics. For instance, Sandis Ozolinsh's card is numbered ??? 001 (DRG 001), as it's the first (out of 29) base set cards of Dinamo Riga players.

Should numbers be added in the db with the cyrillic letters, or with the English equivalent? Before you answer, consider this extra detail: teams like Yugra Khanty-Mansiysk or Salavat Yulayev Ufa have card numbers that include the letter ? ("yu"), which has no exact English equivalent. One'd have to make the number something like "SYUL 002" for Salavat. IMO, it breaks the uniformity of the set numbers and won't make sense to anyone researching these cards on the internet afterward (it yields no relevant results on Google, whereas ??? 002 does). That said, I understand that "??? 002" won't make much sense to anyone who has never learned the cyrillic alphabet and there's a chance that the letter just won't display on some computers.

Has there ever been a precedent on the TCDB?

At least one of these cataloging sites needs to bite the bullet and support unicode in the player database.  The main issue is that it takes up a lot of extra space to support in the database.  I would love to be able to include all of the players' names from Taiwan, Korea and Japan in their native languages.  That would also lead to more traffic from those parts of the world.  The question is, would there be enough traffic to increase ad revenue enough to pay for it?

The system cannot support other language characters. It would be cool if it did, but for right now you'll have to find a workaround.

There are traditional transliteration charts for Cyrillic (and other alphabets).

Thanks for your answers guys. Upon posting, I noticed that all the cyrillic letters turned to question marks in my post. No unicode solves a large chunk of the problem indeed :D

I guess I'll transliterate all numbers (some with 4 letters instead of 3) and link to the official set checklist in the comments, with a note on card numbers.

In this case it might be better to just put the numbers and add in the correct lettering if/when the format allows the Cyrillic. Just a thought

It turns out the database was set up for Unicode all along and with the recent server upgrade, we are now able to tap into that functionality:

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Happy Unicoding!

Well now, that begs another question...can the system support two sets of player/team/set name entries so they can be listed in their native language as well as transliterated in English?