Slow month for incoming business, similar to April and May. Not that there weren’t jobs in the hopper, but these are slow moving jobs, of which I get many, mostly waiting on events from external actors. In response I’ve been working on my filter by country extension. I’m also drafting a book on phpBB. Let’s see if I finish it. If finished it will be a guide to the proper administration of phpBB forums, something that doesn’t exist outside of documentation on phpbb.com. The documentation tells you how to fill out screens, but doesn’t do much to present the bigger picture of give you ways to troubleshoot problems. Obviously if I finish it I hope to monetize it. It would be nice if it generated some passive income for when certain months are slow.
Of course October started off with a bang and I have something of a job queue at the moment. No accounting for this business.
- Updated a board from phpBB 3.2.1 to phpBB 3.2.7. I updated the prosilver_se style and reapplied the custom logo. I also updated the digests extension from version 3.2.4 to 3.2.15 and updated the Authorized for URLs extension from version 1.0.3. to 1.0.5. No issues noted. Customer will update PHP from 5.4 to 7.2.
- Two step job. First updated a development board from phpBB 3.2.5 to phpBB 3.2.7. I updated the Pages and Stop Forum Spam extensions. I reapplied the custom style. I removed what looked like a lot of unnecessary files with _ in the file name. Later I updated the production forum repeating all the steps for the development forum. There were no issues. The extensions on the production forum were already up to date.
- A client insisted on prepaying me to stand up a new forum and likely later tutoring. I set up a new board on a new domain, after first creating space for the domain. I installed phpBB 3.2.7 and the prosilver_se style. I set up reCaptcha credentials as a spambot countermeasure. Later in the month, I provided guidance on using and integrating the board as part of a larger website, which will be using WordPress. I moved the forum into a subdomain. Since a new version of phpBB was released, I updated the new board to phpBB 3.2.8 and prosilver_se style to latest edition too. I also added home link to the WordPress master site. More work on this project is likely in October.
- Invalid reCaptcha keys were causing issues for users of a board for a longstanding (ten-year!) client. I generated a new set of keys, entered them in the ACP and that resolved the problem.
- Updated a board from phpBB 3.2.7 to phpBB 3.2.8. Initially I did some troubleshooting. HTTP 500 errors were occurring. This appear to be because of too much traffic and BlueHost simply cut off further use until some time period elapsed. Later, I installed the Cleantalk extension as a spam firewall so only legitimate traffic would get through. But it doesn’t seem to have fixed the issue. I suspect security software on Bluehost is overwriting cache folder permissions is part of the problem, because many folders have 755 permissions when they should have 777 permissions, and many files have 644 permissions when they should have 666 permissions. Changing these permissions with FTP don’t seem to stick. Something is reverting the changes. Cleantalk may not be working because it cannot talk to the Cleantalk server. Enabled the allow_url_fopen PHP setting to see if that addresses the problem. (Cleantalk was not showing any traffic from the forum.) This work is still ongoing. Right now the forum is largely inaccessible generating HTTP 500 errors. The error log suggests the client is over quota and it is rudely not allowing access when some quota level is hit.
- Client tried to update board from phpBB 3.2.4 to phpBB 3.2.8 and it failed due to a resource issue, reportedly. I tried again and had no issues. Didn’t know what logo to apply so I applied the blue phpBB logo that was already there, but had to change the background area size so it didn’t repeat. Client later reapplied the correct logo.
- Client needed to rehost and update a phpBB 3.0.13-PL1 forum to the latest version. Client decided to rehost first and save upgrading phpBB for later. It turned out that the client did most of the work. I acted as an advisor. I determined PHP 5.4 was not available on the new hosting (only PHP 7 was available) but was needed as phpBB 3.0 won’t work with PHP 7. He got GoDaddy to add PHP 5.4 to his new hosting. He ended up moving the files and database. The database was moved twice because new posts had been made. I had to create a new database user and tie it to the new database to bring the rehosted forum up. I changed folder permissions and edited config.php to tell phpBB to use mysqli (being proactive). Upgrade to come?
