Update Sat. 8:35 PM: I must say I got carried away out of frustration about the PHPBB3 in this post. People tend to react like that especially if they’ve lost 2-3 years worth of data over a non-functioning upgrade patch, however I must say that folks on the PHPBB3 have been quite helpful answering our technical questions on their forum, and since this is a GPL software they really have no obligation to spend time worrying about our business. Thank you so much PHPBB3 team and I apologize for over reacting in my 5:00 AM post.
(Original Post in 5:00 AM)
Hello Tazzu,
I have bad news, I spent over 12 hours trying to upgrade the forum and almost every patch failed half way through the upgrade. I did make both file and database backups of the original Tazzu, but for some reason after restoration, many of the topics are no longer accessible.
I do not know what the problem is and I must say I am not by any means impressed by PHPBB3 and their patches. Major fail! I’ve never seen an application bail out on me like this.
It is 5:00 AM right now and I need to get some sleep. I will continue working to see if I can revive the forum back. I really apologize for what happened. Did I mention how much I am not impressed by PHPBB3? I cannot wait till we migrate to Anahita! There we have good code and simple design, and not this spaghetti code with a pretty interface on top that we are using.
Please continue posting the bugs reports, I’m sure they are out there!
I had the same problem upgrading a phpBB 3.0.0 forum to version 3.0.4. The upgrade failed and the database was corrupt. Fortunately, I have a cron job making daily backups of the db so I was able to go back to a working version.
The mistake I made was assuming that the upgrade would go smoothly. Its always a good idea to upgrade a duplicate site on another server first to make sure it works. I had a similar experience upgrading a WordPress site where it failed and I was forced to go back the previous working version.
In general http admin tools are not always reliable, becuase of timeout issue. Nothing beats the good old command line.
Yes PHPB3 patches seem broken too. I had to try different patches, even tried going from 3.0.2 to 3.0.3 or 3.0.4 in stages and seems like any migration from .2 was not working properly.
We won’t be going back to phpbb3 anymore. we have about half of the data recovered so hopefully 6 weeks from now Tazzu will be back on a decent social web platform. A traditional forum was a temporary solution from the beginning.