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Site to be offline for required updates / may not return
One week to live or die.
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Our Web host is transitioning to the latest version of PHP -- a server-side scripting language that's the backbone of the site. The version of the forum software that Haleyfans is running is not compatible with it.
An upgrade is in order. It's actually way, way overdue because I failed when I last made the attempt. It's possible I may not succeed this time either.
This will not be a simple task because many iterations of the software will have to be located and updated one at a time. This includes a big, defining jump in the forum software's advancement (we're talking years of updates).
When things went wrong in the past it was supposed to be a simple move to one slight update. So that represents the first hurdle to be made.
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A troubling sign... the host turned back the clock on the PHP for a week so I could regain access to the site and work on this.
The first thing I did was a database backup.
This generated an error message I had never received before "Fatal Error: allowed memory size of xxxxxxxxx exhausted..." Checking another portion of the site though I see that backups were created each time. For some reason though they compressed files are about 3 MB smaller than the last backups (14 MB vs 17 MB).
Over time the backups have always become slightly larger. They haven't been this small since December 2015. So if something goes wrong and I have to resort to them I don't know if they'll work.
The error message might also be an indication the attempt to do the upgrade will fail/not complete b/c something is wrong.
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Site to be offline for required updates / may not return
