Much like our old website, our forum software was wildly outdated by the time I first got access to the WSGF server. It ran on phpBB 3.0.10, released in 2012. The WSGF founder, Skip, has been wanting to update it for a while, but may not have found the time to do it or faced the same obstacles as I would.
As I performed the migration to a modern version of Drupal for the main website, I noticed that the old forum required an older version of PHP, while the website framework required PHP 8, so CJM and I had to create an override just for the forum. A year ago, I updated the forum to the latest version within the 3.0 branch, 3.0.14, though that still relied on PHP 5.
More recently, Drupal received changes to pave the way for the upcoming Drupal 12, and one of those changes was its support for PHP 8.5. Around then, I also faced issues when I tried to install an extension required to display upload progress bars, and it seemed like it may have been caused by us relying on two different versions of PHP. Of course, another override was possible, but I decided to finally seriously look into upgrading the forum software.
As it often goes with server administration, including on this very platform, things didn't go smoothly. First I made a mistake and ran the rm -rf (delete) command in the wrong folder, removing many of our files on the main website in seconds before I got to cancel the process. That quickly turned into what was beginning to be a panic attack for me, but I knew what was at stake, so I managed to almost immediately bring the website back up, then proceed to look for backups.
Though the database was good and fully backed up, the files situation looked dire, with 35 GB missing after my mistake. I couldn't find any relevant backups for a while, but then realized our old website folder was still in place along with the files. That covered most of the lost data, but the rest had to be pulled from the Web Archive, Cloudflare, and my personal archive for my Detailed Reports. A few dozen files had to be pulled from our lower resolution cache. Aside from some new users' profile pictures relying on our cache, all files known to the website appeared to be intact based on my testing of 300 since the migration and a random sample size of the rest.
After two days on repairs, I got back to the process of upgrading our forum. There were some hurdles there too: the server config needed a significant rewrite, the DB needed some manual cleaning and row format conversions even after using a tool dedicated to that. Other than that though, it was a relatively straightforward process.
Now what does the end user get from all this? Though the forum was closed for posting as we migrated to Discord and reddit, it is still an important piece of WSGF's history. Since the website upgrade last year, some of the forum threads have attracted thousands of views. To the surprise of nobody, one of them was about Assassin's Creed Black Flag. In addition to the under-the-hood improvements carried by the forum software update, like better security and potentially better performance, phpBB 3.3 brings a mobile interface for the first time since our forum was founded. Reviewing the forum, I also discovered broken image links for images that relied on the specific long-discontinued cache module used by our old website. I wrote a number of overwrites to point that to our new cache paths, resulting in the images being visible again. There's never been a better time to revisit the good old forum threads, including Skip's first posts in fall 2003. And who knows what the future holds from here? One day we might even re-enable the forum for posting.
