Tuesday morning, one of my friends informed me that my web forum was offline. I didn’t think too much about it (servers reboot occasionally) until I noticed another one of my sites was also offline. Both sites were built on an older version of PHP, and a few minutes of troubleshooting revealed that my webhost (HostGator) had unceremoniously (read: “without notification”) removed PHP5, instantly breaking two of my websites. One of the sites, one I used to track my bookmarks, was salvageable. The other, my forum, was completely broken.
The technical issues were complicated by the fact that my forum was running an outdated version of phpBB. The version I was running was incompatible with PHP7, the only version available for me on my webhost. The only way to fix my forum was to upgrade it to a newer version compatible with PHP7, but according to the documentation I found, the first step involved logging into the old forum… which I could no longer do.
By midnight, I had already tried — and failed — to perform the upgrade multiple times. The old forum software wouldn’t work with the new version of PHP. The new version of the software wouldn’t see the old database. Every time something started working, something else broke. It was like working a Rubik’s Cube; each time I solved one side, I scrambled another. Shortly before bed, I decided to kick off the upgrade one last time and let it run overnight. I had hoped that when I woke up Wednesday morning, everything would be fixed.
While laying in bed, I came up with two alternative plans. The first, which I was convinced wouldn’t work, was to create a brand new forum, import the old database, and see if phpBB would recognize what I was trying to do and upgrade the database. The only other solution I could come up with involved building a webserver at home, installing multiple copies of PHP and phpBB, and trying some truly crazy stuff. Trust me, a couple of you reading this almost got calls in the middle of the night.
I woke up Wednesday morning to find that the upgrade didn’t work. Before leaving for work, I tried my “hail Mary” idea. A few hours later, I got a text message from another friend telling me my forum was back online. My last ditch effort worked… mostly. The forum’s themes were broken, the graphics were gone, and the admin panel was throwing up errors from all the incompatible files left behind… but it worked. When I got home from work I literally ran to my computer and confirmed that 11 years worth of posts had not been lost.
“Whooped ’em again, Josey.”
I’m writing this just after midnight on Wednesday, having spent several hours fixing things. For the most part, the only things still broken are things that were broken before the upgrade. I really didn’t deserve to come out of this catastrophe unscathed, but it appears I did.
On to the next one.
You probably should have upgraded that years ago. The fact that you didn’t and of course got away with it just proves the old saying, lazy is efficient. Think of all those hours you didn’t spend upgrading incrementally on the PHP stuff. Is a cyber security guy I had to chuckle about the old version of PHP writing and what that probably implied, but again, if you add it all up you probably spent a lot less hours upgrading it in one shot than you would have keeping it up to date over the years. Not sure what that means but it seems odd.
Went through something similar with my own forums, and nearly had a revolt on my hands when I announced to the folks in the forum that I was giving up hope of recovering the first 4 or 5 years’ posts. I pulled a backup of the database and kept it around just in case a solution occurred to me. Later, when I switched from phpBB to bbPress (the forum addon for WordPress), I remembered that backup and tried to see if I could import both the current forum and that old version of the forum into the same new database, and voila, it worked…kind of. Let’s say it was a 97% success. The one big weird side effect was that there were apparently now two Earls who had posted stuff. But I think everyone overlooked that.
Now, between the https/SSL upgrade that nearly ate my entire site this week, and the weirdness I discovered at the website at work today… I’m starting to think I haven’t been keeping up on this stuff like I should. The whole point of going with WordPress 10+ years ago was so I could Just Concentrate On Writing The Content. But it hasn’t really worked out like that.
I agree, Earl – aside from the fact that I have given up ever trying to have a Twitter integration on a WordPress site, as they just silently break and no matter how many times I fix it, it breaks – when WordPress put their new editor in and just opted everyone in to it, it really killed a lot of my desire to update my own site. We fight with computers every day and I wish that some of the people supporting this stuff which is supposed to be fun (WordPress, hosting companies, the phpBB team) would get that their breaking changes just create enormous rot for the rest of us.