The SimpleRisk application is set to use the UTF-8 character set, but chances are that your database is not also set to use UTF-8. If you see a message in your error log indicating an "Invalid multibyte sequence in argument", then this is quite likely the issue. If so, try adding the following lines to your /etc/my.cnf file:

• init_connect='SET collation_connection = utf8_unicode_ci'
• init_connect='SET NAMES utf8'
• character-set-server=utf8
• collation-server=utf8_unicode_ci
• skip-character-set-client-handshake

For multibyte languages, you may also want to consider installing the mbstring extension for PHP (apt-get install php-mbstring) and configuring the following option in your httpd.conf file:

• mbstring.func_overload = 7 ; All non-multibyte-safe functions are overloaded with the mbstring alternatives