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Forums to be upgraded today

Posted: Sun Aug 29, 2021 7:46 am
by Steve Sokolowski
On Sunday, August 29, we will be performing phases 1 and 2 of a multi-phase upgrade of the Prohashing forums.

In phase 1, the goal is to eliminate MySQL and move the forums data to PostgreSQL, which is used for all other data in our system. The default for phpBB is MySQL, but standardizing everything to one database allows developers to more easily troubleshoot problems, reduces costs in development software, and will allow for automatic backups at the same time as everything else is backed up.

In phase 2, the goal is to upgrade everything to the latest version. We want to upgrade phpBB from 3.2 to 3.3, PHP from 5.4 to 7.4, Debian from 9 to 11, Apache from 2.2 to 2.4, and so on. Most of this current stack, which was installed in the early teens, is now obsolete and there may be security vulnerabilities we don't know about.

The forums may look slightly different when we are done, and we will stop there for now.

In phase 3, we will change the forums style to be consistent with our new branding, which we are currently paying Digital Silk to develop. Phase 3 will be complete in two months, in early November.

It's possible that you may post something today that isn't moved over to the new virtual machine, if it happens to be during the time between when we make the backup and when the new system is switched over.

Re: Forums to be upgraded today

Posted: Sun Aug 29, 2021 1:10 pm
by Steve Sokolowski
Steps 1 and 2 of this upgrade are now complete. We'll proceed to step 3 later in October.

The forums should now render 4 times as quickly, but if your restriction is bandwidth or connection latency, you won't see any difference.