Today, when I refreshed the forum page, my screen was filled with


Some upgrade of some software ran into an issue with the forum setup, perhaps?

(Edit: Previewing this message creates a screenfull as well..)

Yeah, wow... The forum has gone extremely trippy, and I can't read PM's.

Was odd for me earlier today but appears to be fine now. For me at least.

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"Only connect!"

I have been able to temporarily fix the problem. Here's my summary of what I believe is going on and what lies ahead.

This board runs on phpBB software, which was installed on our servers many, many years ago by Rich Lafferty, who maintained it for many years.

Rich bowed out quite a number of years ago and has not been able to help us, except on a couple of occasions when he was able to come in and help with specific problems.

The version of phpBB isn't the latest version.

In the meantime, our hosting service, Dreamhost, did a mandatory update of all their websites to the latest version of PHP, PHP is a server-side scripting language designed for web development but also used as a general-purpose programming language. If that last sentence sounds smart, it's because I copied and pasted it in.

Our current version of phpBB is not compatible with the new version of PHP. Thus the day just passed when the board behaved in very odd ways.

I have made a temporary fix (should take care of the month of March), which involves flipping a switch in the engine room that will allow the board to continue function via the older version of PHP. However, by April, that fix won't work anymore.

I believe what is required at this point is an upgrade of the board to the newest version. Because it's a big board, and the databases are old, and will require backing up and restoring the data....what could possibly go wrong?

Dale

Looks good now. I saw the same type of error messages on another site today, it wasn't even a forum - just some website I surfed through.

It's doing it again here.

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"Dreams about the future are always filled with gadgets." - Neil deGrasse Tyson

"An anti-lunacy gadget would be nice..." - Nano

Yes, confirmed. It's baack..