During October, it often felt like I was spinning gears. I generally had plenty of work to do, but couldn’t finish or even get started on much of it. This happens sometimes. Mostly this happens when the work is specialized and nuanced and requires a lot of communications and planning. Much of this in October was due to two potential phpBB 2 forum conversion projects.
I’m still surprised when I receive these requests. phpBB 3.0 was released in the mid 2000s, so phpBB 2 boards are fifteen or more years obsolete. They should have been converted a decade or more ago, but some board owners keep them working somehow despite of the changes in technology. To do this, you have to hold onto old versions of PHP, like PHP 5.2, which was long ago deprecated. You also have to put up with many arguably now-annoying aspects of phpBB 2, including its non-responsive design. So on mobile devices, these boards lay out poorly and to see the content you either have to unpinch your screen to see the full width of the screen. At some point, most web hosts set a deadline and tell clients they are out of luck if they have applications that use these old versions of PHP after a certain deadline.
Also, these old PHP versions are not patched with potential security bug fixes, making their use dangerous.
But a lot of board owners have an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it mindset” and somehow keep it going until they can’t anymore. Then I often get these requests. Conversions from phpBB 2 are still possible as the convertor software is still in phpBB’s installer package, but the phpBB Group would like to retire the software. I’ve urged them not to do so as I still make probably at least $1000 a year converting these old forums.
But to convert them the client must have new hosting with the correct technical requirements (such as PHP 7.1.3 or higher) and that takes time. Also, downtime must be scheduled and often there are unique requirements. One client has a heavily modified phpBB 2 board which should convert okay, but I won’t know until I try. It all amounts to being somewhat risky not to mention time consuming. Anyhow, I’m sitting on two of these jobs waiting for clients to have the new hosting in place so I can do these jobs.
I also had a family reunion in October which took me away for about a week, so that didn’t help. My large commercial client had only a little work for me so there was little to bill there. Of the few things I did finish in October, these jobs were included:
- Upgraded a board from phpBB 3.3.0 to 3.3.8. I moved board to a folder from a subdomain but the database did not move. The hard part was removing spam. My spam remover extension falsely identified too much spam as it was about 99% spam. Moved to my machine because it was so slow. Eventually I figured out when the spam started and removed all topics created after that and a lot of obvious spam posts that remained, leaving a few hundred legitimate posts. Work spanned some weeks and was tedious.
- Updated a board from phpBB 3.3.4 to 3.3.8. Updated three extensions: media embed, quick style, advanced BBCode Box and added Google Analytics extension. Updated prosilver_se style and reapplied custom changes. Issue unable to install advanced BBCode Box extension due to invalid directory structure.
- Updated a board from phpBB 3.2.8 to 3.3.8. Changed PHP to 8.0. Updated we_universal style to the latest and reapplied style changes. Later, the client decided to replace the style with prosilver_se and provided logos for me to integrate.
- Installed phpBB 3.3.8 generic on a subdomain. Tutoring to come.
That’s all folks!
