Primarily for sorting and counting purposes (some story entries use it as well), but everything else uses the binary form of UTF-8.

Never tested emoji yet, but they should work...

Doesn't work, even directly through the database. Someday, I will figure out why.

Update 2026/09/18: EMOJIS NOW WORK! It was database setting related. 😁👍

MariaDB: 10.6 to 11.4: old-mode explicitly needs to be empty due to old-mode mapped to utf8_is_utf8mb3 by default, so: 'old-mode = '
MariaDB: 11.8 and newer: Nothing to do; character_set_system will be mapped to utf8mb4, overriding old-mode.

Reference: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67696563/setting-utf-8-in-mariadb-server-ignores-character-set-system