The development and playground databases should have the correct character sets and collations due to how they were created by Puppet. But the production database was created so long ago that it looks like it has the latin1 character set by default.

It's not posing a problem at present since we have a migration which manually sets the auth_user table to use utf8, but I think it would be a good idea to set the database default character set and collation when an opportunity arises.

We'll have to get MySQL command-line access to the production database, then run:

ALTER DATABASE <dbname> CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

Might be worth testing this (I haven't) and taking a snapshot before doing so.