Two broken Forums after Transfer

February 26, 2023, 12:42:35 pm

Hi!

Our hoster will give up her server soon. She had been the hoster for our forums and homepages for about 17 years. We had "full service" with her. She did almost everything about databases, software and other things. Now we will be on our own webspace. The two forums had been tranfered by her 3 weeks ago from her server to my webspace; the two homepages of my friends will follow.

One of the forums is still SMF 2.0.19 with SimplePortal, forum is about guinea pigs:
https://das-meerschweinchen-forum.de/index.php

The other forum (forum is about dolls and other antique toys) was finally sucessful migrated from SMF to ElkArte by TE in June 2016. With a lot of help from Spuds, Emanuele and some others here I created this theme those days:
https://puppenstubenforum.de/elk/index.php

For several reasons guinea pig forum has been never migrated to ElkArte and I also never did the upgrade into 1.1.x for the dolls forum. It is still running ElkArte 1.0.10. with SimplePortal.

I tried once for a while on my testforum with themes for the newest versions of ElkArte and SimplePortal. Those days, the new version of portal still had some bugs, this was one of the problems, i had. But new themes for both of my forums had been almost finished. This testforum including database was unfortunatly deleted one day. So I lost all my files, images, textes and also the code snippets from Spuds. I did not start this testing again then. Maybe Spuds does remember, that he also had been there on my testforum, searching for bugs in portal and how to kill them.

Both forums did run very well all this time, even they had been in older versions for a lot of years now. During the last years both forums had also been transfered a few times by my hoster from one to another Server of her. It allways went well. Last transfer was in November 2021.

But this time, 3 weeks ago, both forums had been damaged during the transfer. SMF Forum seems completly broken to me. (Forum Search does no more work at all, Error-File does no more display all the errors, which are there for sure now, portalblocks can no more be edited or created, etc.)

The ElkArte Forum looks a lot better and is working again so far. But there are thousands of errors in the log file now. Each clic will produce about 20 errors in sources/subs.php. They all look like this. "Function create_function() is deprecated" seems to be a very bad and serious error?

I dont know, what happened exactly during the transfer. First all looked well after the transfer, then we noticed, that new posts or topics will all appear in the latest topic on forum. And all posts had been twice there and had as attachments all avatars of the forum:

Our hoster said, it has to do with the "integretaion hooks". She deleted the portal then, also another addon i use...and maybe did some of the transfer again or was changing something else, i dont know. Posting did work then again as it should. Those two addons had still been in paket manager. So she uploaded them again. But this old portal version did not have those changings, which Spuds and me made after our migration. So maybe this deleting and uploading was also causing trouble and no more working features.

There had been some more issues on forum after the transfer. After a few other changings of her, i dont know, which ones, all seems to work again so far.

Our hoster said, all this happend now, because our forums have too old php-Versions. The transfer brought all this up. I shall make the upgrades now. Both forums wont run anymore at all in 6 months, if I dont do this now, she said.

It seems not possible at all to me to make an upgrade now in those "broken" forums. I would not even know how to do upgrades, if both forums would run well and without any mistake. Some of you know, that I have almost no knowledge about all this technic. I think, i almost never installed a forum sucessful by myself. And I never did an upgrade by myself. I cannot reapair a damaged forum. My "old hoster" is no more willing to support me. I feel really lost now and I do need help.

So please tell me:

Is there a way to safe this two forums? Maybe the SMF Forum could be safed by a migration to ElkArte?
Is there any solution for the ElkArte Forum? I would need help with this Upgrade as well.

The members of both forums said to me, that they would give some money to someone, who could "repair" the forums and bring them in the newest version.

I tried now to install a new testforum with ElkArte 1.1.9. on my webspace. But I cannot even do this.

Re: Two broken Forums after Transfer

Reply #1 – February 27, 2023, 04:48:10 pm

Quote from: Ruth – February 26, 2023, 12:42:35 pmThey all look like this. "Function create_function() is deprecated" seems to be a very bad and serious error?

Yes those errors are due to the level of PHP that the server is running. Newer versions first started by "complaining" about using that function, and the most recent versions simply don't allow it at all. Really the only way to fix that is by upgrading to the 1.1.x line, its the only version that supports the newest versions of PHP (8.2)

Many hosts do not allow running old versions of PHP as those versions no longer receive any security updates, so they force users to the new versions, which in turn requires new versions of the forum and new versions of the addons.

Upgrading from 1.0 to 1.1 should not be a problem, the biggest change will be updating the theme. If you could send me a PM with server login (SSH) credentials I will take a look at what may be involved. I'll want to grab a backup of the DB and site and put it on my local test server.

Re: Two broken Forums after Transfer

Reply #2 – February 27, 2023, 10:00:29 pm

Thank you very much, Spuds.

This is so kind of you!
I will send you a PM.

Yes, a new theme will be needed as well for the upgrade.
This is, why I wanted a test forum again.