Here’s a summary of my work in December 2015, which was a bit lighter than normal. However, I still met my income goals for the year. When I was not fixing user problems I was mostly working on my digests extension.
- A forum stopped functioning because the sessions table needed repair and the client had no idea how to do this. The more general problem was the storage engine for all the forum’s tables were MyISAM, so to keep the problem from recurring I changed the storage engine for all tables to INNODB, which is what phpBB does for new installations of phpBB. Later, a problem was reported that a newly registered user could not see any forums. After an investigation, I discovered there were no read or post permissions for members of this group for any forum.I tried to add them in phpBB but they didn’t take. An invalid form message occurred instead. Applying permissions for all forums did not work reliably. However, with perseverance I was able to get it to work for a category. I asked customer for guidance on what forums should be exposed to newly registered users and what their privileges should be. Also did an analysis of their spam problem and asked for authorization to fix it.
- Client had issues when he cleared his forum’s cache. Images no longer appeared because images were no longer on his file system and he didn’t have copies of them. Client decided the best approach was to upgrade from 3.0.12 to 3.1.6. Client’s setup was peculiar because he had a dedicated host with a highly non-standard web host control panel. After a few hours of research I was able to puzzle through his hosting interface and I upgraded his forum from from 3.0.12 to 3.1.6 using the default prosilver style. I had to tweak his php.ini file to remove errors that showed up on the Administration Control Panel’s main screen. I provided client with rehosting advice since he was paying about $500 a month for a dedicated server he didn’t need. When he is ready to rehost I expect to help him.
- I ghostwrote a technical article for a client.
- I placed a new logo on the header of a forum, changed the styling to remove text appearing on the header and remove a blue vertical image. At client’s request, I also placed a logo on the login page below the login button. Later in the month I provided advice on her overall site architecture, which was not mobile-friendly. I suggested she move the non-forum content into WordPress, and suggested some shopping cart WordPress plugins that she could use for her electronic commerce.
- Client did his own rehosting but afterward the database kept disappearing and database was sometimes empty. His config.php file was pointing to the wrong database and the host was periodically recovering it, causing the weird symptoms. The database user attached to the forum’s database had disappeared, so I created a new database user, gave it needed permissions to the database and changed his config.php accordingly. I restored his database from a file backup. The program viewtopic.php was missing but I uploaded that from a phpBB 3.0.11 reference.
- Fixed an issue with “Strict Standards: Non-static method utf_normalizer::nfkc() should not be called statically” error message using solution I found here. Forum was using phpBB 3.0.10. After discussion with the client about whether to upgrade to 3.1 or the latest version of 3.0, he decided to upgrade to 3.0.14. I upgraded him and reinstalled his 4 mods. I also upgraded my digests mod that he had installed from version 2.2.11 to 2.2.26. In addition, I tweaked the logo by putting it into the theme and placing an off-white color behind it. I provided guidance on properly using the Advertising Management mod. Later, at client’s request I made tweaks to the banner background image. A couple of days later client discovered his ads were not appearing. I had forgotten to make changes to his style for ad placement. Puzzled through them and had to tweak the style a bit to make them look acceptable.
- Attended an hour-long Skype call (requirements discussion) with a client. At her request I did some minor editing of various web pages (outside of phpBB). I removed a Facebook icon, changed some link destinations and installed ACP Add User extension on her forum. This was because her forum is very sensitive and the client wanted her staff to create all users manually. I spent another 1.5 hours tutoring a staff member on how to do administration and moderation. Later in the month, I added the ACP Add Users extension to their sandbox forum.
- I installed the Cleantalk extension on a forum, added the registration key, removed lots of inactive (spam) users and set up the Administration Control Panel for new users to confirm registration so admin didn’t have to approve these personally.
- Client had changed the database password and updated his config.php but no one could access the forum. This was because the old password was actually embedded in PHP code in the forum’s cache folder. I cleared cache manually using FTP and the board was usable again. I provided instructions on how to do this manually should it recur in the future.
