Illuminati-R-Us

Sorry about that guys!

The host did that update I mentioned a few weeks ago. With us being sick, I completely forgot to prepare for it.

I begged and pleaded with the host and got them to temporarily roll us back to give me more time.

Tell them it's that or the IrU death ray. Not a choice to be taken lightly.

Shhhhhhh!

Yes, that's what I had to do.

Ah should have read this first.

In all seriousness, going almost half a day without IrU seemed like a harsh fate, I tell you.

I was getting the code as well, but could scroll down to read the usual content. Could log in but not post. Tried to send Lance a PM but it would not send.
Glad to see you were able to get it up and running.

So does this mean it's going to go down again, while the host finishes the update? And if so, when and for how long?

They rolled back the update just for our site. It will stay that way until either I change it or they do another big, blanket update.

PHP is the platform that the forum (phpBB) runs on. Our current version is about 9 years old. There have been many updates to both the platform and the forum software in that time, that I've ignored based on the principle of "if it works, don't fix it".

A comparison might be like trying to run an old 8-bit game on Windows 11 x64. It's not going to work because the software requires features no longer available on the platform.

The platform is controlled by the host, and they generally make many different versions available. But their recent update removed all versions older than 7.4 due to security issues. We run on version 5.4, so we're way behind.

The main problem is that this board is highly customized, and an upgrade of the software will lose all that. I've done it before, but it's time consuming. In the past, I've installed the newer version alongside the old one and upgraded a bit at a time. You'll notice in our URL the /forums/. So I create /forums-new/ for the replacement, and work on it when I have time. Then to switch, I just make /forums/ into /forums-old/ and then /forums-new/ to /forums/. So we go down, but just briefly.

In this case, the new software won't run on the old platform. So I need to figure out the best way to do it.

So yes, there will be an outage at some point when I figure out the best way to do it. But by then, I should know when and for how long.