March 2018 work summary

What a busy month during March! The first week was a bit slow but pretty much the rest of March I was busy serving clients, many of them commercial clients, which likely made it a record month for work billed, not all of which has been paid yet. A summary of the work is below. As always, who I did the work for has been kept anonymous.

• Upgraded a forum from phpBB 3.0.14 to 3.2.2. After the upgrade, I could not show the index until I increased PHP’s max_execution_time by editing the forum’s .htaccess file. Installing my digests extension did not work, perhaps due to issues with bringing over data from the digests mod that was installed. Importing digests from phpBB 3.0 has been pretty extensively tested, so I’m not sure what the issue was. I ended up going into the database and correcting various tables and effectively installing and enabling it that way. I recommended installing reCaptcha as a spambot countermeasure.
• A client was having trouble with WordPress shopping cart tied to PayPal. An email notification by the shopping cart was getting forwarded to a bunch of email addresses. Apparently the email address was set to forward all email it got to a number of other address. Changing the forwarder fixed the problem.
• Updated a forum from phpBB 3.2.1 to 3.2.2. Uploaded a freshened prosilver_se style and Danish and German casual honorifics language packs. Updated Tapatalk plugin to version 2.0.7. Reapplying style changes required changes to both prosilver and prosilver_se. Later, I fixed an issue of an inability to attach pictures to posts by simply purging cache. Later, I configured the reCaptcha spambot countermeasure due to bounced emails being received. I suggested changing the user registration settings to user activation by email.
• First I did some troubleshooting. A phpBB 3.0.8 forum could not display certain pages because PHP Notices kept coming up. Trying to edit these out with error_reporting statements did not work for some reason. There were some odd issues with the host too, such as it would not report which version of PHP was installed. Client eventually authorized an upgrade. The FTP credentials provided did not work, so I ended up creating two FTP accounts until one of them worked. This allowed me to upload a new version of phpBB. The upgrade succeeded after fixing an issue in the database of no active style. The preferred AcidTech style did not work with the large rotating images the client wanted places. So I tried a couple of other styles. We settled on a black/green ne-blackgreen style. I had to integrate client’s in-house ad rotatator program so a number of images would rotate in the header. I made some style changes, mostly to remove gradient images that were messing up the placement of the navigation bar. I added the Advertisement Management extension. I placed a PayPal donate button at the top. Integrating a Google Adsense ad did not work. I used the old code but think it’s too old as it was used inside a table. I did some extra work to put two other ads next to each other with different sizes. Changed max-width of the content area from 900 pixels to 90%. Later, I installed Tapatalk extension version 2.0.7.
• Client moved the database and files for his forum to a new host, just needed me to finish up the work. I could not connect to the forum after changing the config.php file to point to the new database. This was because PHP 7 was being used and phpBB 3.1 uses mysql_connect, which does not exist in PHP 7. No matter. Uploaded phpBB 3.2.2 and the database update worked fine. I replaced the logo. I removed dead ACP modules. Later, I discovered I apparently I upgraded the wrong database (an older version of the forum), so changed config.php to point to the correct database and upgraded that with no issues.
• Troubleshooting on a phpBB 3.0 forum. Database exceeded it’s quota of 1GB. The issue was a tapatalk_push_data table, which had 779MB of data in it. I truncated the table. I recommended updating the mod as it seems to be a bug or moving to phpBB 3.2 or rehosting.
• Clicking on some thumbnails did not bring up the larger image. It appears there were some lost images due to a RAID failure in 2016. Some files in the files folder showed 0 byte length. Some files did not exist. I could not find a backup of these images. So I wrote a script to sort of fix the issue by making the thumbnails the actual photo: changing the filesize attribute in the attachment table to the thumbnail’s size and making the thumbnail column 0. In 88 cases the thumbnail files did not exist either. Provided client with a screen capture of all these abnormalities so he can decide if he wants to delete or edit these posts.
• In part one of a two part job, I upgraded forum from phpBB 3.0.4 to 3.2.2. Since the forum was integrated into a larger commercial site, I did an extensive analysis of what would be lost with an upgrade. There were many code insertions into phpBB to do some things unique to the business. With the new architecture, this should not be done, but there were no extensions to do the previous functionality. Much of it revolved around a “Get a quote” service. The best i could suggest was to allow these installers to have standard signature lines that would embed this information and link to their referral program. Once we agreed on all the workarounds, I started off with upgrading the less trafficked site as the first test. I applied the AllanSubsilver style. I made some CSS and template changes to accommodate site heading and Google site search, changed some colors, changed some container widths, and address some font issues. I installed and configured the Google Analytics extension. I installed the Advertisement Management extension but did not add any ads at this time. I demonstrated the Get a Quote feature in a signature line. I removed contact information from view topic screen by hiding it. I did various other tweaks. I added the announcement on index extension. I configured reCaptcha and removed thousands of bogus registration and spam posts that quickly accumulated when the forum went live. I suggested they might want to use Cleantalk extension and service. Later I addressed a reCaptcha issue of the CAPTCHA image not showing upping PHP from 5.4 to 5.6. It turned out though that there was some other PHP software on the site that could not use PHP 5.4. PHP was reverted to 5.4. I found a setting in Plesk to set allow_url_fopen to on and the issue went away. More than a week later, I did part two (second domain). A lot of the work was the same as the first part, so it went somewhat faster since I knew what the issues were. Header was different with dynamic content scripts I could not integrate, so I copied/pasted the resulting code. Installed same extensions. Configured reCaptcha. Hid logo block entirely since that was the way it was on the old forum. Did not put fuzzy image along borders of main content area to match what was there before. Changed PHP to allow it to open external links. Changed script for main site to not retrieve a block of recent topics since the database schema had major differences. Likely more tweaks to come in April to close off this project.
• I upgraded a forum from phpBB 3.1.10 to 3.2.2. Client has a ton of extensions. He decided to upgrade those himself and just have me do the upgrade. The style for Platinum for phpBB 3.2 was not official and I found issues when I installed it. For example, navbar.html did not have logoff and other links! So copied and pasted the version from prosilver and used that and it worked with the old style.
• I finished an update/upgrade the client started but failed. I could not login to forum with credentials given. I could not use FTP with credentials given either, but was able to create some in cPanel. I tried a few obvious things to get the upgrade/update to finish that did not work. I ended up copying up the entire 3.2.2 source code and it was able to finish the upgrade/update. I placed the logo image using the File Manager editor in cPanel.
• New install of phpBB on a test server that would eventually be migrated to a production domain. Client wanted to imitate the forum at another website and wanted it put together on the test domain. Some wasted time because I thought he wanted me to imitate his existing website. Most of the work was trying to make the styling acceptable. Client selected the AllenSUBSILVER style. I installed the Advertisement Management extension and placed a sample ad. I installed Pages extension because client wants a bunch of static pages like Contact, Ads, etc. They have placeholder text. Styling was challenging because I decided to use the navigation bar for his other pages and I had to make it red, but doing this made a lot of text and icons impossible to see. So I had to change CSS for submenus so the desired look was accomplished. 90 minutes of tutoring online followed some days later.
• After an upgrade I did in February there were dead extensions showing on the Customise tab, extensions that worked in phpBB 3.1 but were not available for 3.2. I fixed the by deleting these rows in the phpbb_ext table using phpMyAdmin. Client asked if there were ways to improve performance. I suggested upgrading PHP to 7.2.
• More work for a client I helped in February. He had weird database permissions issues which caused certain extensions not to install. He moved the forum to a different server, and that seems to have solved previous database permissions issues. Basically the people on this site like lots of features, and wanted me to install a boatload of extensions, many of which were problematic because they were in development, beta, etc. After being assured that I would be paid for extensions I installed that might not work on phpBB 3.2, I ended up installing a total of twelve extensions, some of which as I expected had issues and were subsequently disabled.
• Upgraded a forum from phpBB 3.0.10 to 3.3.2. Installed Revolution style but tweaked it quite a bit. Background color changed from black to white. Increased minimum widths for content area. Reduced vertical space for logo and content area as it was too generous. Styled the search box to make it look similar to other content areas. Installed reCaptcha V2 as spambot countermeasure.