April was a slow month. Not sure why, but I think April 2018 was the same way. Maybe people were focusing on their taxes. When things slow down though, it can be good. In my case, it meant getting out a new version of my Smartfeed extension and two new versions of my Digests extension. Anyhow, here’s a summary of my work in April:
- This work was for a client with a very large forum and active community of women. The forum was phpBB 3.0.12 and an upgrade to phpBB 3.2.5 was desired. I did this in stages.
- Back in January, I did a development upgrade as a proof of concept. Here’s a summary of that effort. First, I upgraded the client’s development forum. As is often the case, I had to manually create the phpbb_config_text table first before the upgrade would start. I tailored the chosen style to match current style in phpBB 3.0.12. I installed Tapatalk, Thanks for the posts, Digests, ACP Add User and Google Analytics extensions I disabled the contact page and enabled the reCaptcha V2 spambot countermeasure. I added a home link. I did not set up digests cron as it would interfere with the digests going out on the production forum, but the digest subscribers carried over correctly. I noted that the Tapatalk extension may not work correctly until moved to production. There was no ForumRunner extension available. I asked about installing PM Search extension (RC) extension. I noted that the Thanks for the posts extension may need permissions set up. A few days later, I installed PM Search extension, a release candidate.
- Finally in April I did the production forum upgrade. This was more complicated than usual because the new forum was going to be on a newer and faster machine, which meant the old forum was put in read only mode until it was complete, and a copy of the database and files were first staged on the new machine. I also had to use SSH to do all the work. The first conversion failed due to various data consistency issues. Eventually I installed phpBB’s Support Toolkit for phpBB 3.0 that removed some inconsistencies in the database. I also loaded a vanilla phpbb_styles and phpbb_modules table from a phpBB 3.0.14 database to get past these issues. Then upgrade worked, after again creating the phpbb_config_text table. Afterward, it was pretty straightforward. I enabled styles, enabled extensions, and completed the digests cron setup and testing. I fixed an issue with popups not going away when marking all forums read. A few days later, an issue with the style I created was noted. Mark forums read would not work, nor would mark all/unmark all. The problem was two instances of including jQuery, both in the header and footer templates. I removed it from header, and added to footer to match how it was done in the prosilver style. A few days later, I fixed an issue with incorrectly formatted birthdates where the user_birthday field was DD-MM-YYYY instead of MM-DD-YYYY. I created and ran some SQL to fix the issue. Some dates have blank years. Later, tried again to install a version of Thanks for the Posts extension that works with Tapatalk, but which uses a different mobiquo folder. I had to enable both the original and new thanks extension, then disable the original one, to avoid seeing two thanks icons. When testing with the Tapatalk app, I saw a thanks button at the bottom of the post.
- Painful update from phpBB 3.2.1 to phpBB 3.2.5. Lots of annoying hosting issues getting into cPanel, using the file manager, getting FTP to work reliably, etc. Also upgraded the Advertisment management and Cleantalk extensions. I reapplied the logo and cleaned up some custom code in the header and footer. Client’s hosting is subprime, slow and problematic to use.
- Upgraded a tiny forum (just 55 posts) from phpBB 3.0.10 to 3.2.5. I changed PHP from 5.4 to 7.1. Hostgator hosting. So easy and simple!
- In early April, a client had a strange database issue where a lot of the forum’s tables mysterious were dropped. So when trying to bring up the forum, an error occurred. The last good backup was from October 2018, so the database and files were recovered to that point. There were a number of emails with the client trying to figure out an earlier issue, the latest was that one spam post was in a digest. The recovered database was phpBB 3.2.1, so I upgraded it to 3.2.5 (second time!) and reapplied the logo. I then updated Stop Forum Spam, Digests and Cleantalk to the latest versions. Cleantalk was not enabled, but Stop Forum Spam was. Enabled both but probably both aren’t needed. To work, Cleantalk needs to be able to query its remote database, so allow_url_fopen had to work, so I tested it. PHP is up to date with 7.2. Previous cron job is still working and digests are going out. As for the spam in the digests, these were because of some spam posts. It probably occurred because Cleantalk was not enabled and the Stop Forum Spam database did not know this poster was a spammer. I manually deleted the spammer’s account and their posts. With Cleantalk now enabled and phpBB and all extensions up to date, it should not recur.
- More work for a client I upgraded in March. Some members of the forum like to stream music on the site using an integrated Shoutcast server. The controls were integrated into the forum’s header on phpBB 3.0. He wanted to get this feature working again. It worked on phpBB 3.0 as a mod, but there was no approved extension with similar capability for phpBB 3.2. There was a development and abandoned radio extension that I tried. Testing involved setting up an account on a Shoutcast server hosting site and it seemed to work, but controls like showing the current playlist did not work with the extension. After the proof of concept showed that the songs could at least be streamed, the client got a formal contract for a Shoutcast server and asked me to integrate the new server so songs could be played and enjoyed by all. The old player used Flash technology. Since Flash is dying, buggy and a security risk I didn’t want them to use Flash anymore. I eventually found a low tech solution: use the <audio> HTML tag which renders a simple player on all browsers, but without any fancy styling. This worked quite well as a standalone solution, which I integrated into the overall_header.html template for the style. As for the radio extension, we eventually decided it was too buggy to use so it was disabled. In addition, they use the mChat extension so members can talk about what’s playing in real time. I showed the client how to use phpBB’s permissions to limit who can see the chat window, since many users didn’t like it. I suggested setting up a group for those who wanted to stream music and giving them permission to use the mChat window.
