Less work than usual this month, in part because I was settling into a new house and that took precedence. Fortunately, work slowed down to give me time to do things I had to do anyhow, so no stress!
- Painful lesson learned in incomplete backups. See this blog post. Geeky details: I tried to upgrade a forum with 1.4M posts from 3.0.11 to 3.1.6. Upon running database_update.php I encountered an error: Fatal error: Class ‘Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\DependencyInjection\Extension’ not found in /home/mattash/public_html/forum/phpbb/di/extension/core.php on line 25. I figured it was likely due to bad or inconsistent data in the client’s 3.0 database. So I installed the phpBB support toolkit and fixed issue with certain forums not appearing by running the left ID/right ID utility. I also removed some empty topics. I changed phpbb_users table to change language from “english” to “en” — it’s unclear how this got so nonstandard. I slowly upgraded from one micro version of 3.0 to another, from 3.0.11 to 3.0.14, hoping to mitigate risk. I tried again with a fresh install of 3.1.6 but same error occurred. I sought help on topic on phpbb.com but none of their suggestions worked. I tried a third time to do the conversion with a clean copy of 3.1.6 but same result. Could not restore database after 3.1 upgrade attempt. This was because the downloaded backups were not complete. I asked client to see if web host had a backup and to restore that. Eventually I recovered the database by patching together pieces of other databases and writing a program to create the missing topics. With a complete archive, for cost reasons the user decided to leave it as an archive and create a new 3.1 forum. Once it was created, I installed a bunch of extensions and moved his new forum into the web root. I installed the Board3 Portal extension on the new site and it is set to be the default for the site.
- Ad hoc work for an existing client during October. Patched db.php to use a SQLServer CAST SQL statement because a SQL Server error occurred when trying to update a config_value for a row in the phpbb_config table due to a too small integer for the value that needed to be written. I made another patch to add a CAST statement when another function trigger a similar error. Enabling a new extension group caused an integer overflow again so I yet again added more code to use a CAST statement for SQLServer. I attended a Skype conference call with client and answered questions from his employee and on the forum. I documented a MCP screen overlay issue with a phpBB bug report. I put in an enhancement request on phpBB’s bug tracker to use the <video> tag for .mp4 files so plug ins would not be needed for these files. I fixed another SQLServer issue with integer overflow on Manage attachment link.
- First I addressed an issue where phpBB could not connect to the database. The password in the config.php file apparently was no longer valid for the database and database username. So I created a new password in cPanel for database user and changed config.php to reflect the new password. Then I upgraded forum from 3.0.11 to 3.1.6, reinstalling the logo and using the ported prosilver_se style.
- Upgraded a forum from 3.1.2 to 3.1.6.
- Installed a beta version of the Advertising Management extension for a client. While I was in there I upgraded phpBB from 3.1.5 to 3.1.6. I later placed four ads in the beta Advertising Management extension since the user needed some help with HTML for the ads and added code to track clicks.
- I ghost wrote an technical article.
- I was paid for an hour of miscellaneous work over last few months plus placed a new ad in the top spot for new advertiser for the client.
- Client was having a terrible spam problem. I first removed some spam users with zero posts and a listed website URL in profile, 444 users altogether using SQL. I later removed 6193 bogus topics by guest on the same forum, 976 bogus posts by guest and removed 33 orphaned posts, all with SQL. Everything is clean and shiny again, and spambot countermeasures and permissions were improved to reduce the likelihood of this happening again.
- I upgraded plain prosilver forum from 3.0.x to 3.1.6. The database upgrade took a long time because of 300,000 users, most of them bogus. I also removed these inactive users from the database.
- I upgraded my digests mod from 2.2.25 to 2.2.26 for a client to fix an error where an inactive user who had unsubscribed was getting a digest.
- On a phpBB 2 forum, the unread and new private message counts were incorrect in the users table, triggering an error when trying to store a negative value for the number of saved messages when the column type did not allow it in MySQL. I did a number of queries, exports and imports to fix these values. I also added a real name statement next to username on the registration screen.
