talkFORUM

Apologies - we have either had hacking activity or the hosting service has screwed up badly, I know which one my bet is on.

I have fixed the main error that was causing the complete lock out and we have a temporary fix, but for a little while people will need to log in with our IP address which is - 23.229.203.186
That means people will need to login on each new visit and there are still some error messages flaoting about. I will probably fix them by scheduling an upgrade which is overdue by now.

With thanks to Dan and Alex for their help in identifying the problem

Thanks Mark. I posted info on quiz chat but not everyone is going to see that unless someone posts the link on digitalspy!

Cheers mark. Some posts look OK, others appear blank for me at the moment.

It looks like it's the posts made after problem started didn't make it. Getting following at the top of each thread.

[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 494: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead

It's the posts with quote tags that appear blank. If you quote the post you can see the message is there. (I mean click quote to read it, then click back, not actually reposting it!)

Other tags might be doing it too?

Ah, if I try and post a quote it says "Your message contains too few characters."

Img tags have the same result. It's probably all tags.

Well done everyone in getting it back.

Well done fellas. Are you going to move it onto a more permanent platform? It’s unsecured right now, not on HTTPS?

When this is back up we need a TF war room contingency plan to maintain communications if it happens again. Thanks to some total twats the DS thread for this exact purpose was canned.

According to the forum registration details it went down almost immediately after it was updated on the 21st Oct. I made it 20th myself around midnight but it's a fine line.

My own personal business website went down a few weeks back for days on end and I hadn't got a clue why but I eventually worked out it was the name servers which were wrong. Even the hosts didn't seem to know why until I pointed it out then they made an announcement to other users.

I'm not saying this is the problem but I'm just chucking it into the mix for consideration just in case it's something as simple as this. When I put the revised ones in, it was back up within seconds.

Huzzah!!

^ reported for goading.

So,

First the host service suddenly decided that it would update the PHP code to version 7.3 which is the main problem as it exposes a lot of existing poor coding in the bulletin board programs that run the site. I have downgraded PHP back to 7.1 which means that it is not capturing the most severe errors. That means we can get the site back up but some of the other lower level errors are still being trapped which means that things like quotes are not being processed.

Some of that forum level code is a couple of years out of date so I need to get it updated. Whie I wait I might downgrade PHP a bit more to see if it stops trapping even more errors.

The second problem is that somebody has made changes to the nameservers and the DNS settings have got out of sync. That is why the talkforum.co.uk address is currently not working. That will be the next thing to fix.

Well done Mark !!!

Well done, chaps.