July was busier than most recent months and had a frantic end to it. As a result, I’ve developed a backlog I’ll try to work through today and tomorrow. My work though for a major commercial client though is about to end. There may well be future work, but the plan is to deploy the upgrade to their phpBB 3.0 board on Saturday. I won’t do it because it’s mostly being done by an Ansible script my client created, but will be on standby as needed. I imagine they’ll want more changes at some point and will ask me to do them. It’s been a two and a half year endeavor, but not so much this year as the work was largely completed last year. This year has been about testing and bug fixing. Other work in July:
- A client was unable to get into the private messages inbox or do anything in the Administration Control Panel beyond the default page. The client had a WordPress plugin integrated with phpBB too. I did a lot of analysis and trial and error and did not quite fix the problem, but communicated the general issue was due to caching. Turning off CloudFlare and ModSecurity didn’t solve the issue and manually purging phpBB’s cache wouldn’t necessarily uncache changes I made to programs to test their functionality. At length, the client determined the issue was due to an adware tracking system the customer uses. It has some sort of cache that the customer was able to disable that allowed ACP access. So my role was to principally determine what the problem was not, which allowed him to eventually figure out where the problem lay.
- Updated a client from phpBB version 3.3.7 to 3.3.8. I also updated the Italian language pack to version 3.3.8 and Advertisement management extension to 2.0.6.
- Upgraded board from phpBB 3.2.3 to 3.3.8. The web host first changed PHP from 7.2 to 7.4. phpBB has a setting that allows user’s IPs to be checked against two large blacklists. Checking it against spamhaus.org was causing issues. So I disabled that setting in the ACP. I also removed a number of dead modules still in the ACP from an earlier phpBB 3.0 upgrade. I changed the spambot countermeasure to reCaptcha V3 and enabled it. I hid the phpBB logo on plain prosilver style. There was also an issue with very short ACP session times. I changed the cookie name but didn’t seem to help. I installed the American English language pack and latest version of the Cleantalk extension. I also removed the unused Digi style.
- Rehosed a board from Hostgator to a virtual private server on another host. The board had about 90,000 posts. It was mostly straightforward, but I had to load the database twice as some sort of error importing the database kept happening. Uploading the database without a zip archive worked. phpBB 3.3.3 was installed but the client did not want to upgrade to 3.3.8 at this time. There were also some Cloudflare DNS issue to sort through. The customer’s actions on Cloudflare seemed to make the changes that stuck. No SSL certificate was present but Cloudflare seemed to provide one.
- Rehosted a board from GoDaddy to a VPS on jetrails.com. Moving the database and files was at first straightforward using SSH and SFTP, but solving a SSL certificate and emailing issues took days of back and forth with the web host. Eventually I determined that I first had to create virtual name servers for the domain. Then there was a confusing process of how to configure the registrar to use them. I had to go through a confusing GoDaddy process to use custom nameservers and then needed the host’s help to figure out the remaining DNS issues, which meant two DNS records for the nameservers had to be added on their host. This then allowed me to create a SSL certificate. Setting up an email address on the VPS and getting the SMTP settings was also confusing. The domain was on one blacklist. The host removed it from the blacklist when I called their attention to it. But it didn’t immediately solve the email integration issue. Eventually I realized there was no admin email address created for the domain which I needed to get the SMTP email integration to work with phpBB. Created an email address called outgoing and that worked, although it initially directed emails to a spam folder.
- Updated a board from phpBB 3.3.4 to 3.3.8. I charged for two hours of troubleshooting for various emailing issues he was having.
- Client had a complaint of bounced digest emails for users whose subscription type was set to None. Couldn’t verify any recent occurrences. I changed the email package size from 0 to 20 after noticing one emailing error two days earlier on posting. Also updated my digests extension from version 3.3.11 to 3.3.15.
- Client reported that emails sent by phpBB weren’t going out. I eventually figured out SMTP was not being used so changed it to that, changed the port to 587 and changed the mail password. It then worked. Client used Bluehost hosting. When I called, I found their phone support was useless but online chat helped troubleshooting the emailing issue. Later updated phpBB from version 3.3.4 to 3.3.8 and the following extensions to latest versions: Media Embed, Lightbox and Advanced BBCode Box.
- At the very end of the month, I concluded a four day, time consuming, 25-hour project to integrate custom sidebar and other changes in a board upgraded from phpBB 3.0 to 3.3.8 by the client. I had to upload phpBB 3.3.8 source files again and run install program to show a phpBB 3.3.0 to 3.3.8 successful upgrade. Client chose the Prosilver Dark style. I made a custom style that inherited from it to which changes were applied. The work, conducted online via Skype for the most part, was frequently frustrating due to the client’s need to bring up the highly trafficked board with all its features as soon as possible. The whole process was quite inefficient. There was lots of back and forth, shifting requirements and technical approaches. I was originally going to use an extension to inject code into sidebars because PHP cannot be used in templates anymore with phpBB 3.3.8. But it turned out it was static HTML created with PHP so this could be copy and pasted. I then tried using an <iframe> tag for sidebars but there were scrolling issues with sidebar and main content being separate scroll areas. To be expeditious, a right sidebar project that served an ad was abandoned. The left sidebar needed the integration of menu, shout box and other customizations that were tightly coupled with other systems. Toward the end the client got another developer to fix a few issues with the chat box and scrolling that I couldn’t fix. There were lots of style tweaking and some template changes.
