A lot of forum owners are procrastinators. The current version of phpBB (as of this writing) is phpBB 3.2.3. If you are not on the phpBB 3.2 you should upgrade. Why?
Because in two months the group that manages the PHP programming language (which phpBB is written in) will stop supporting versions of PHP 5 with security fixes. This means after January 2019 you may be vulnerable to new exploits found in PHP 5, used by phpBB 3.1 and earlier versions.
It’s understandable why you might not want to upgrade your forum from your current version, generally phpBB 3.0 or 3.1. As most of my work is upgrading forums I see all the time why forum owners drag their feet. Reasons include:
- Their forum has lots of mods and custom changes made over the years. With modifications not supported in phpBB 3.1 and higher, they have to figure out how to move forward. Many modifications do not have the equivalent available as extensions. So they either have to give up the functionality of the mod (which often makes forum users unhappy) or just procrastinate as long as possible. Procrastination is the easier approach.
- Their forum has a style with lots of changes. Perhaps a logo has been integrated that is nonstandard, or they’ve made major changes to the templates and the stylesheets. Lots of styles haven’t been migrated to phpBB 3.2 either, so this is another issue they will have to deal with if they upgrade.
- They know just enough PHP to be dangerous, so they’ve tweaked the code here and there to do special things. That would go away with an upgrade, or at least the cost of making changes to the base code gets more expensive. It’s heavily discouraged and makes upgrading or updating phpBB a pain, because you often have to reapply these changes. Custom changes can be done by writing a custom extension, but it’s a complicated thing to do. You need to be a very experienced PHP programmer to write an extension, and heavily study phpBB’s architecture and coding requirements.
- Having someone like me upgrade your forum costs money.
Now that push has come to shove though, unless you are willing to bear the security risks, it’s time to finally make the upgrade. phpBB 3.1 users are not off the hook either, because this version of phpBB does not support PHP 7, the latest major version of PHP. I helped a client migrate their forum just yesterday to PHP 7. PHP 7 was installed on their new server. Certain things stopped working or created PHP notices.
Note that versions of PHP before 5.6 are already not patched for security issues. So if you are using an earlier version of PHP like PHP 5.2 (popular for phpBB 3.0 and 2.0) or PHP 5.3, 5.4 or 5.5 you are already at risk. You really can’t upgrade to PHP 7.0 as you will experience errors. Some phpBB 2.0 and 3.0 users have issues running PHP 5.6.
So now may be the time to take the plunge. Of course I can help you in this process. You may want to read my upgrade page. In addition to running the latest version of phpBB, I think you will find that once you are there it is worth the hassle. The extensions architecture of PHP 3.1 and higher is very nice, almost as nice as using WordPress plugins. The themes are responsive, so they look great on mobile devices. In addition, PHP 7 is about 50% faster than PHP 5, which is another great incentive to upgrade, particularly if you have performance issues with your forum.
You can send me a query if you want to discuss upgrading your forum.
