Urgent Opinions Needed - Is it safe to re-open our forum in this state?

[JLS]

Hey guys,

Our forum has been closed down for several days now since our upgrade and it's killing us. At this point I think IP staff is only working on one of the problems (mon-fri unfortunatly) due to my idiotic way of submitting multiple support topics in one ticket. They have made mention of the other problems but I'm not sure they deeply looked into it. But right now I NEED to re-open my forum. I made database backups before the 3.4 to 4.1 upgrade and I have normal full site backups. But my fear is if they will end up needing to go back and restore or try to re-encode from those backups killing off any new fresh content posted. Does that make sense? I'm going to outline my current issues so maybe experienced ones can tell me if this is something that they can fix with including new content posted or if it's in-danger of needing to back-track and lose all new posts.

1) 1st problem I won't bother to post a screenshot of but we are a photography based forum. Prior to the upgrade our images were posted by uploading into the post and using the "insert into post" feature. Our images average 1000px wide and displayed in-full in the post. After the upgrade, all those images in-post became tiny little thumbnails (you can click to view the full size). So that's the problem that IP Tier 2 is currently working on. They are trying to use a script to rebuild the thumbnails I believe but it keeps timing out due to the number of images we have. They say that with this specific problem it should be safe to open the forum. I believe because they are just trying to regenerate from the originals so it doesn't effect anything.

2) Here is a screenshot of a rendered post I took prior to the upgrade. You can see it appears this post just had breaks inbetween the lines. We have thousands of posts exactly like this one.

Here is the rendered post after the update


Here is the html


As you can see, it now made each line of the post a paragraph which I don't believe is how it was before as there was no typical paragraph spacing before on the rendered post. In addition to the paragraph it's also adding the break making the spacing even bigger between words. There is no way possible it was like that before. But it makes the forum look a mess. IP staff originally took a glance at it and claimed it was normal that they became paragraphs but I really don't think so. Do you? Especially not with breaks as well?

3) Here is some of our encoding issues in the screenshot below. In some areas where apostrophe's and other punctuation type symbols like that were they became all gibberish. It appears to be at random too. Some places apostrophes are fine and other areas they don't. I believe this is from the utf-8 converter so I don't know if it needs to be redone or how they will fix this? But it's ALL over our forum and looks horrible.



4) Emoticons I've looked into the least but it appears some of our emoticons are not displaying at all. Just shows a blank square. If I view the source code and click on that link it opens the emoticon in a different window. This appears very random and some work and some don't. These are just the default emoticons. Also, the ones that do display now have a border around them but I assume I can hunt that down in the css.



I'm sure there are likely more problems but those are the key issues now. What do you think? I REALLY appreciate any immediate advice you can give because this has gone on too long and it's critical I re-open since our forum is a paid subscription only but I know I shouldn't if I might lose all new posts as that would really upset my members.

Thanks!

[Ausy]

If there were a lot of posts after you upgraded and you don't want to lose them then your only option is wait for support to fix things.

If there were not many posts after you converted it may be best to restore your backup. Open the forum and continue your business.

After that use your backup to create a test installation and spend time upgrading that. Once you fix everything and know what changes to make, upgrade your existing forum.

I believe there was a script somewhere to remove the large spaces between lines of text but you would have to run it at your own risk and again should be on a test install first.

Some help with the line spacing here, check if it still would work with the latest version.

 

[JLS]

Thanks for the reply!

I have backups but since I'm using separate membership managing software that I continued to accept memberships in for other areas of the site then I think that might end up a nightmare trying to re-align both software.

Thank you for that article! I'm a little worried if I ran that script it might effect a future more solid and supported fix that IP might put out? Maybe I should do the zero margin (none destructive) fix temporarily until I get an official recommendation from IP? Sounds like my forum would look a little better at least while I wait. I'm glad I understand what happened more but wonder why a lot of my posts ended up with breaks like above as well? Others didn't mention that issue...

But still sounds like I might be up a creek needing them to re-run my conversion for the odd encoding issues? Or I wonder if IP support has scripts to fix those issues?