February was a pretty typical months work-wise. Neither too much work nor too little. Nothing particularly challenging. Mostly updates and upgrades, which is typically the bulk of my work.
I did pass 1000 service requests in January. I current stand at 1010 service requests since I started the business in 2006, with 362 distinct clients.
- Troubleshooting trying to get forum redirection to work. An error message was coming up instead. I chatted with web host and put in a ticket and they eventually solved it. Also upgraded the forum from phpBB 3.2.2 to 3.2.5. I did not update six extensions where updates were available or the Platinum style.
- Updated a forum from phpBB 3.2.2 to phpBB 3.2.5. Did not update the custom style or any extensions. Registrations emails were not being received. I tested the process. Mine ended up in a spam folder. I then looked on a blacklist site and discovered that client’s host had reported spam from his site. I suggested that he talk with DreamHost about getting off these blacklists. He also wanted some registration text changed, so I made an edit to /language/en/ucp.php, initially, then again after the update since the file had been overwritten. I also changed the email address to the forum to use one for his domain so emails were less likely to be flagged as spam. I installed a beta extension that copies post from one forum to another automatically. Later, I set up a special group the client wanted and set permissions accordingly to NEVER for posting privileges in the one main forum. This work inspired this post.
- I updated another forum from phpBB 3.2.3 to phpBB 3.2.5. Client reported that there were spam posts that moderators are catching and deleting. There was no obvious reason why, but it was likely that the Q&A spambot countermeasure was guessed and that was being used as a vehicle for creating accounts that were then used to create spam posts. Newly registered users get automatic moderation, which is how they got flagged. I changed the spambot countermeasure to reCaptcha V2 checkbox. Later, I installed the Cleantalk extension. But I went back to Q&A spambot countermeasure because allow_url_fopen PHP setting would not take on Hostgator hosting. Later, I sent info on allow_url_fopen issue for Hostgator for them to take action on. There was an issue with Javascript when creating new registrations. Clearing the cache fixed the issue.
- Client reported a database error accessing forum. I assumed the issue was with the database credentials but that wasn’t the problem. Four folders did not have 777 permissions, changed to 755 permissions, but it didn’t solve the problem. I checked the database and it reported phpBB 3.2.5 was installed, so I assumed an incorrect upgrade was done. I first copied vendor folder but that didn’t solve the issue. I then copied all the other files from a 3.2.5 reference and that worked, once I had a good set of login credentials.
- A client had my digests extension installed and blank digests were reported going out. I investigated the issue and found a bug in digests that affects lowly trafficked forums that use the default phpBB cron, documented here. I created a patch and placed it on the domain to test it. I changed the server setting to explicitly use a system cron, even though curl is used in the cron in cPanel. Later, I determined that the old cron job was set up to use http but https is now used on the forum, so a redirect was happening in the cron, causing it to fail. I changed it to use https and added the -k flag to curl to not check the certificate. Later, I updated the forum from phpBB 3.2.3 to phpBB 3.2.5.
- Updated two forums for the same client that are largely identical, updating the software from phpBB 3.2.3 to phpBB 3.2.5. I also updated the AllanStyle Subsilver style retaining customizations. I updated the Advertisement Management, Google Analytics and Cleantalk extensions. For one forum only, I also updated my Smartfeed extension.
- I upgraded forum from phpBB 3.0.4 to 3.2.5. This was kind of an emergency because the client’s the host changed PHP version to 7.2 meaning the old software no longer worked. Just figuring out what the client had meant looking inside the database to determine the version of phpBB they were using. The forum has about 440,000 posts. There were some timeouts during upgrade, but I worked around them by removing the migration that did not finish from the migrations table and then restarting the database upgrade. (Using CLI was not an option as SSH was not an option.) I installed the Tapatalk extension. The client had to provide me his Tapatalk key to complete its configuration. I disabled the new contact form feature so it wouldn’t attract spam. I set up a reCaptcha V2 spambot countermeasure. I removed a lot of smilies that were missing images by deleting rows from the smilies table in the database. Then, a test post timed out. I spent an hour on the phone with technical support, trying all sorts of things. What worked was my suggestion to repair all the tables, something I could not do in phpMyAdmin because of hosting timeout. I provided some advice on procuring a SSL certificate and changing tables to the InnoDB storage engine to make future timeouts less likely. I installed a non-default style (Anami) which included an extension as a user interface.
- Updated a forum from phpBB 3.2.4 to phpBB 3.2.5. FTP was very slow and had lots of errors, timeouts and zero length files. I uploaded archive of vendor folder using the file manager to fix 0 file length errors.
