When I am in the admin panel, I get this error when clicking on  CJforum | Topics ( /administrator/index.php?option=com_cjforum&view=topics )

An error has occurred.

500 Illegal mix of collations (utf8mb4_general_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8mb4_unicode_ci,IMPLICIT) for operation '=' Illegal mix of collations (utf8mb4_general_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8mb4_unicode_ci,IMPLICIT) for operation '='

We are using  utf8mb4_general_ci collation for almost all of Joomla tables. ( This is recommended by many vendors...)

but after CJforum update, those tables get changed  back to utf8mb4_unicode_ci - and thus we get this conflict.

Is there a way to solve this, so I don't have to mess around after every update??

Do you run your entire Joomla installation as utf8mb4_unicode_ci ??  We don't want to try to change collation on our whole site ( we have some fair-sized tables, our db is currently half a gigabyte... )

I am not getting collation mismatch error messages from any other components. Some ( like community builder) still use a mix of utf8mb4_general_ci and utf8_general_ci...