The Price of Progress...

[DieHard]

TO ALL NEW MEMBERS, I AM SO SORRY, PLEASE REJOIN THE FORUM, WE HAD TO RESTORE A WEEK OLD BACKUP

After Updating PHP versions, Forum Patches, and Updating our Forum Mods for literally the last 3 days...

Unfortunately, we have lost all new posts since 08/10/2012 (6 days worth), and a weeks worth of new members.

I know this is terrible news, what's done is done, apparently there are bugs in the GoDaddy SQL manager that does not report an error if a database backup times out, by absolute luck I made a duplicate copy of the Database on the hosting server itself, before I ran Forum patch tests on the testing Forum, for the last 24 hours I thought we lost all posts since Mar 2021; so 6 days actually does not sound that bad right now as I go off to bed.

As Knez pointed out, we had some pretty bad security issues running PHP 5.4, We are now on PHP 7.3, is addition, we have gone up 5 versions of Forum source code to 2.0.17.

I do not plan on fixing what "ain't broke" for a while, this last scare was very "un-cool"

Please check you own posts and general forum functionality and let me know if we are not out of the woods yet 

[IIO]

everything else seems to work fine and i could swear the fonts look s little better on ff win now.

[Knezzen]

You’re not alone in this and you can always reach out to me if you need any help with this stuff.

From experience it’s always less of a hassle to just keep up with the updates of forum software and backend software instead of jumping 5 versions in one go. You’re one version from the latest version now. Go the full length and then keep it up as new versions come along and there won’t be any issues

[DieHard]

You’re not alone in this and you can always reach out to me if you need any help with this stuff.

From experience it’s always less of a hassle to just keep up with the updates of forum software and backend software instead of jumping 5 versions in one go. You’re one version from the latest version now. Go the full length and then keep it up as new versions come along and there won’t be any issues

That sounds so good in theory, unfortunately many of the MODS I purchased make the update Patches "Fail" on testing prior to install.... so it's either uninstall a bunch of mods or manually edit the source code of the 4 to 6 failures.  I found it easier to uninstall the mods, patch updates, and re-do Mods and settings; it is much easier to do that once than for each patch as they are released.

That is why I am not so diligent of keeping things up to date 

[Knezzen]

That sounds so good in theory, unfortunately many of the MODS I purchased make the update Patches "Fail" on testing prior to install.... so it's either uninstall a bunch of mods or manually edit the source code of the 4 to 6 failures.  I found it easier to uninstall the mods, patch updates, and re-do Mods and settings; it is much easier to do that once than for each patch as they are released.

That is why I am not so diligent of keeping things up to date 

Sure and I get that, but what makes this community great is the threads, the people and the passion. I'm sure the majority of us would have no problem dialing down the "bling" for some added security and keeping up with the times (security wise). I work with stuff like this for a living and from experience it's worth keeping everything up to date. I think you would do the site and yourself a disservice to just stop here for the next 5 versions or so

Just my two cents

[chrisNova777]

how does this even happen? were u just messing around with "updating" versions of software?
does it make sense to make a timedbackup of the database couple times a day? that overwrites itself?

[DieHard]

how does this even happen? were u just messing around with "updating" versions of software?
does it make sense to make a timedbackup of the database couple times a day? that overwrites itself?

Unfortunately the GoDaddy SQL manager AND the Simple machines database backup (via the admin panel) BOTH have a nasty habit of truncating the SQL file and not reporting it as an error, The only fool proof method of backing up the forum, I have found, is to actually clone the database in "PhPMyAdmin"