Upcoming Maintenance!

Practice posts and questions about the boards. The registration code for this board is 'Th3G@m|ngD3n' (Note the use of numbers and symbols!)

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Zherog
Knight-Baron
Posts: 907
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Upcoming Maintenance!

Post by Zherog »

Hi all. Hope everybody here is well. Who knew "2020" was going to be a freakin' trilogy? :bored:

So, remember last year when we were down for a really long time? Yeah, it sucked. That happened, in a nutshell, because our host updated the version of PHP and never told me they were going to do it - though they insist they did. By blocking the older versions of PHP, our software no longer worked and we were forced to upgrade to a newer version of phpBB in order to get things up and working again.

Well... they're doing it again. At least this time they did give me notice - two whole weeks. :bored: Thankfully, I just learned that upgrading from our 3.2.11 version of phpBB to 3.3.5 isn't all that difficult - though there were some snafus caused by their directions not being as clear as they could've been. The upgrade will happen in two stages.

Step 1: Next weekend, I'll do the update from phpBB v3.2.11 to 3.3.5. I'll be starting at around 8pm Saturday, 19-Mar EDT (00:00 20-Mar GMT).Based on how long it took me to do the update on Nifty (which is more or less a "test" for the Den nowadays), and adding in some wiggle room just in case, I expect to be completed within 2 hours. During that time, the site will be unavailable and will give a message stating that it's down for maintenance. If something goes bizarro and it ends up taking longer than 2 hours, I'll update the message to let whoever is trying to login know what's going on and what the new ETA is.

Step 2: Somewhere between 23-Mar and 25-Mar, the host will update php to version 7.4 and older versions will no longer be available. Frankly, I wish they would give a narrower range of when it'll happen. Simply updating somewhere in a 3 day window is gonna potentially suck. There's a good chance that once the host is done, nothing changes and I can update to the newer version once i know they're done. On the other hand, Murphy is a cruel son-of-a-bitch, and so there's always a chance that once they do the upgrade from their end, things will fail until I A) know about it; and B) have a chance to login and update to using the newer version. In the best-case scenario, I find out they're done and go ahead and change to the newest version. However, Murphy being the usual asshole that he is, if things go wrong I would expect that I'll also end up being stuck at work and unable to login for a little while. Or I'll be asleep when it happens. Or who knows... Basically, "Step 2" could be nice and smooth, or it could be a few hours of frustration. Either way, once I know the upgrade is done and I have 15 minutes to switch over, everything should be all set.

Cheers! :z:
You can't fix stupid.

"A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives." ~ Jackie Robinson
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Zherog
Knight-Baron
Posts: 907
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Re: Upcoming Maintenance!

Post by Zherog »

The scheduled maintenance is now complete. We had one minor hiccup, but some Google-fu resolved that.

We are now running on phpbb v3.3.5. (We were previously on 3.2.11.) I'll leave this thread here for a week or so. If you encounter any behavior that you consider odd, please post here with as much detail as possible - date, time, what happened, what you thought should happen, etc.

Cheers! :z:
You can't fix stupid.

"A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives." ~ Jackie Robinson
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JourneymanN00b
Prince
Posts: 4238
Joined: Fri Jul 10, 2020 8:51 pm

Re: Upcoming Maintenance!

Post by JourneymanN00b »

The spoiler tags do not work. I tried posting my spoiler tags in post 32 in my latest gaming thread, and the forum software is not recognizing the tags.

The post in question is below:
viewtopic.php?p=553065#p553065

The problem also seems to be replicated here as well as demonstrated below:
[spoiler]Test[/spoiler]
Say No To Fascism. The left is the one true way to go.
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Zherog
Knight-Baron
Posts: 907
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Re: Upcoming Maintenance!

Post by Zherog »

Thanks for pointing it out. A quick glance doesn't show anything obvious. I'll post for some help on the support site and see if anybody can help out.
You can't fix stupid.

"A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives." ~ Jackie Robinson
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Beroli
Prince
Posts: 2518
Joined: Tue Jan 18, 2022 1:26 am

Re: Upcoming Maintenance!

Post by Beroli »

Been a year. We ever getting spoilers back?
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