by Lance » Sat Mar 02, 2024 4:17 pm
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.
No trees were killed in the posting of this message.
However, a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.
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Build a man a fire and he will be warm for a few hours.
Set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life.