The nature of my business seems to be that it the work is few and far between or it all comes in at once. The first half of the month was mostly quiet. The second half was mostly busy … too busy. Anyhow, here’s a summary of my work in February. As always, I am not identifying my clients:
- A lot of work here for one client. Basically, the client wanted a whole lot of changes to his forum. The endeavor was sort of successful.
- I installed a development radio extension. This puts a player on the screen that plays music from a playlist for all members on the forum. I had to tweak the composer.json file to get it to install. To get the radio player images to appear on the portal, I had to hack one of the programs for the extension to use an image path that starts with / or they would not appear on the portal.
- I tried to install Tapatalk a number of times but to no avail. I kept getting an installer error creating the Tapatalk tables. Upgrading phpBB didn’t work. So I tried installing an earlier version of Tapatalk. That didn’t install either. Since the issue was with the Tapatalk table not being created, I installed Tapatalk on a test environment, got the needed SQL there using phpMyAdmin and recreated it manually on the client’s site in phpMyAdmin. I changed the phpbb_ext table to make it active and cleared the cache. I could then see it in the Extensions tab and could enter the key.
- Created an Apache redirect so non-www URLs went to www instead. Lines were added to .htaccess file.
- Changed the color of the text in mChat when editing chat text. It was white on white, made it black on white.
- Added a favicon for the site
- Installed an extension to open external links in new tabs
- Installed the Profile Flair extension. This allows badges to be created.
- Installed the YouTube Video Gallery extension. It requires creating an application in Google console to enable, which the client did.
- Updated phpBB 3.2.1 to 3.2.2. Applied three manual changes afterward, bugs that were subsequently found in the release.
- Edited some colors on the portal sidebar that kept text from being seen.
- Fixed a resizing issue with embedded videos on mobile devices by adding max-width:100% and max-width:100% CSS directives for the object tag.
- Made more tweaks to colors for the “time” line near the navigation bar, made better CSS selectors for poll links in the portal and moved vote buttons in the portal more to the right, along with vote totals.
- Radio extension turned out not to be viable. So I disabled it. I tried to place the player manually. I tried a number of approaches, once I figured out how to write the Javascript correctly. The easiest way was to turn it into an ad in the Advertisement Management extension and place it above the navigation bar.
- More trouble with Tapatalk when the client tried to add a permanent Tapatalk key. Again the extension failed in an ugly manner and again the issue was some sort of database privilege that should have been there was not, probably for creating new objects like tables, columns and indexes. I commented out some code in the extension to get it to come up so the board was usable, but feels jury rigged. Installed some smilies that client needs to configure. The client is getting with his web host to try to solve the underlying issues of database privileges needed to create new tables that seems to be the issue with Tapatalk.
- I upgraded forum from phpBB 3.0.10 to 3.2.2. I applied patches to 3.2.2 after the upgrade. There were two issues during the upgrade. The first (duplicate row in config table) went away by running the upgrade again. The second required using phpMyAdmin to edit the prosilver style and make it active. Then the upgraded completed. I removed some dead modules carried over from phpBB 3.0. I created keys on reCaptcha site and entered them into reCaptcha spambot settings, but they were not recognized. I eventually discovered if I requested invisible reCaptcha those keys would work. There was a similar issue with a Cleantalk authorization key. The client had to generate a key on Cleantalk site and he installed it himself. I also installed the Advanced BBCode extension. I noted an email error I encountered with the upgrade. It may be an issue with integration with email. Later that day when the client removed my FTP account (since it gave access to the web root) it also removed everything in the public_html folder! So his whole web site including the forum was gone! The web host had to recover it. The next day I reapplied the file changes for the upgrade and uploaded the programs for the extensions that were installed. The database was still good so I didn’t need to run the upgrade program again. The client asked me to look into errors in some 3rd party software tied to phpBB in his members folder. It asked for PHP 5.4. I changed his .htaccess file but that exposed an issue that the code was using super globals, so it didn’t work. I suggested contacting the original author and having him update the program to use the new phpBB 3.2 libraries. Client eventually figured it out himself.
- Lots of work for this client too:
- I converted a forum from phpBB 2.0.23 to 3.2.2. About 200,000 posts with about 7000 attachments. The conversion went smoothly. Allen Subsilver style installed. I replaced the logo. I recreated search index. I moved the old forum into old_forum folder where it exists as an archive.
- Later I installed a Board Rules extension and Custom Registration Agreement extension.
- Customer discovered a weird problem. When using the search index, sometimes a XML parsing error occurred. After lots of puzzling it through I realized I had seen this before. Non UTF-8 characters (probably belonging to the Windows character set) were in post_text column and other columns. The parser could not parse these characters because they were not translatable into UTF-8. I fixed it with SQL using MySQL CAST and CONVERT functions on all columns in tables where users type in text.
- Removed and re-place some ads in overall_header.html for a phpBB 3.0 forum
- I got called in as a consultant for a huge forum, the biggest I’ve ever seen: 14M posts! That’s about 4 times as many posts as are on phpbb.com’s forums which have been running since 2001! What a strange issue they were having! For about 48 hours they could operate as normal, then the database would freeze updating num_posts in the phpbb_config table. All they could do is recover the database and start again, then 48 hours later it would happen again. They were very frustrated. The error message suggested that some transaction was not getting completed. In addition, the value for num_posts in the phpbb_config was not consistent with the actual number of posts. On top of all this, this phpBB 3.0 forum has a site Wiki outside of phpBB, and the Wiki made posts to their forum using a MySQL stored procedure. What to do? It took hours to get command line access just so I could look around. Once inside MySQL I looked at the tables. Most were using the MyISAM storage engine, but the phpbb_config table where the problem was happening was using the InnoDB storage engine. If I changed its storage engine to MyISAM, would the problem go away? I did and the problem went away! Oh, I also wrote some SQL so num_posts matched the actual number of posts in the phpbb_posts table.
- Upgraded a forum from phpBB 3.2.1 to 3.2.2. No surprises.
- Updated a forum from phpBB 3.2.0 to 3.2.2. A direct 3.2.0 to 3.2.2 update would not work and caused Symfony errors. After much trial and error an upgrade to 3.2.1 then to 3.2.2 worked. I reapplied the logo and styles. I was asked to set permissions so users could edit their own posts and to fix an issue with their posts not going through moderation. It took some puzzling to figure this out. Apparently when a new user registers, they are placed in both the Newly Registered Users group and the Registered Users group. Unless permissions for Newly Registered Users are set to Never the privileges for Registered Users, if more generous, will take precedence. So for Newly Registered Users, I added Never permissions for seeing forums they weren’t supposed to see. Although newly registered users were required to have one post before they were considered registered users, posts are only moderated if the moderation permission is enabled, which it was not. So I turned on these permissions for this group.
