MAMMOTH Changes occured

[Dissident]

Here is the post I put up this morning

Hey all

The forum is slow. It's old. Like me. Like most of us.

The biggest issue is that the forum was installed and setup over 21 years ago. The version of PHP it runs on, is 5.6 which was released in 2014 and was supported until 2018.

I can't just "press a button" to upgrade the PHP, as the forum itself ONLY runs on that. I need to upgrade the version of the forum from 3.0.14 to the latest 3.3.x version BUT that's upgrading a bunch of times, and things break - the forum could stop working, data could be lost, and the massive hours of customisations I made could be deleted.

BUT it is what it is. So I need to plan for it.

The size of the database at the moment, the age of the PHP/forum software - is not sustainable.

Please be prepared to go backwards in order to go forwards

I've spent the last week researching, planning and running through upgrades on test data to get to a poiint where I can probably make most of this happen.

So, please be ready for a change - both good and bad, in that things won't look the same straight away but hopfully will be quicker and in theory better as I'm sure the new software has good positives as well.

The customisations are an issue, all the visual effects I made, all the addons (likes, etc) could be gone. But really, there's no choice

I'll keep you updated.

Thanks

I have spent so long working on this, and I think it's better

I bit the bullet and moved the old forum, and put the upgraded one in it's place

I've changed a ton of server stuff, and code.

There's still a lot to go but the more I work on it, the more the upgrade data is out of date (as in posts put up by you all)

As it is, I've post around 80 posts that were put up today. That's unfortunate but it is what it is - the longer I take, the more posts are gone.

I have installed a very basic version of the theme, and put the header up

Lots of things aren't the same, but I'm slowly working on this to get them as close to what they were.

Please let me know anything you notice, and what's missing

Many thanks

D

[dedja]

Awesome effort Diss, well done and much appreciated.

[Dissident]

I think I've managed to upgrade the likes system
It erased all the data of previous stats and likes

But I think I've managed to import all of that too

So, please check that liking posts works too

[Dissident]

**** me, I have to be at the Bridgeway to run quiz in 15 minutes haha, lost track of time.

[locky801]

Strange works on my phone but can’t log in on desktop or laptop. Any suggestions

[dedja]

Strange works on my phone but can’t log in on desktop or laptop. Any suggestions

Works perfectly for me on any device.