Just upgraded - lost most avatars

[Square Wheels]

I was on 4.1.4.1, all was well.  I upgraded to 4.1.5.2 (whole package), and most avatars are now missing.

I tried the support tool twice, no luck.

How can I get this fixed?

Thanks

[Rheddy]

Unfortunately, some of your members will have to re-upload their avatars. I ran into the same problem on my forums as well, when I upgraded from 3.4.7 to 4.1.4 just about a week ago.

[Hexsplosions]

Did you take a backup?

[Square Wheels]

4 minutes ago, Morisato said:

Unfortunately, some of your members will have to re-upload their avatars. I ran into the same problem on my forums as well, when I upgraded from 3.4.7 to 4.1.4 just about a week ago.

I just ran through them and deleted all of the missing images.  What a pain.

3 minutes ago, Evil Edwina said:

Did you take a backup?

I did, but aren't they stored in many different folders?  I already opened the site.  I'm not rolling it back.

[Hexsplosions]

1 minute ago, Square Wheels said:

I just ran through them and deleted all of the missing images.  What a pain.

I did, but aren't they stored in many different folders?  I already opened the site.  I'm not rolling it back.

I was going to suggest re-uploading the uploads folder and skipping overwrites. Obviously take a backup of your current uploads folder first.

(Unless it's a data issue as opposed to missing avatars, in which case I think you're stuck.)

[opentype]

3 minutes ago, Square Wheels said:

I just ran through them and deleted all of the missing images. 

Why?
It wasn’t even figured out what the problem was. I would say there was a very good chance it was just a simple configuration problem (i.e. wrong paths to actually existing images) or could be solved through backups if they really got deleted (which I don’t think). 

[Rheddy]

@Square Wheels. Unfortunately, it's probably just a side effect of IPS4. IPS Support explained to me that because IPS4 is a major upgrade from IPS3, many things were either reset to default or had their options or features set to disabled. When IPS Support upgraded my forums, I discovered, to my dismay that many features were disabled, some were reset, and forum and topic access had been disabled.

From what I discovered:

• topic posting was disabled for my root admin account
• avatars were reset to where most registered members no longer had avatars
• post box editor features were disabled
• forum skin installations were reset to "0"
• signatures were disabled
• forum moderator permissions were disabled anywhere from 10% to as much as half
• privacy policy links that are supposed to be visible by way of the installation are supposed to be set to visible by the forum software (which is a requirement for all websites)

There are possibly more features that were disabled but that I'm discovering the post-upgrade bumps on a daily basis. Most of them are being reported from members of my community. It's not a slight against IPS, just a minor inconvenience regarding the software.

[eGullet]

Avatars missing is not really in the same category as a few settings changing -- it means either the files were deleted, or the forums expects them to have different names. We did not lose our avatars going from 3.4.8 to 4.1.5 so I doubt very much this was an intended consequence. Did you file a support ticket?

[Rheddy]

I never said it was, eGullet. The upgrade to IPS4 from IPS3 changes quite a few settings in IPS, this isn't something that can be bypassed. The avatar problem is just one of the symptoms of the upgrade which you'll have to have all members reupload their avatars and simply reuploading your "uploads" folder isn't going to change the problem. The upgrade doesn't remove the uploads directory, you'll find the directory is still there. Your users are still going to have to re-upload their avatars because the new avatar system is different in IPS4. This is one thing I found out quickly because I had to delete directories where I had applications installed, because IPS4 doesn't delete those old directories, it's the same with avatars. It's a pain but your users are going to have to re-upload.

[opentype]

40 minutes ago, Morisato said:

I never said it was, eGullet. The upgrade to IPS4 from IPS3 changes quite a few settings in IPS, this isn't something that can be bypassed. The avatar problem is just one of the symptoms of the upgrade which you'll have to have all members reupload their avatars and simply reuploading your "uploads" folder isn't going to change the problem. The upgrade doesn't remove the uploads directory, you'll find the directory is still there. Your users are still going to have to re-upload their avatars because the new avatar system is different in IPS4. This is one thing I found out quickly because I had to delete directories where I had applications installed, because IPS4 doesn't delete those old directories, it's the same with avatars. It's a pain but your users are going to have to re-upload.

Firstly, Square Wheels was only doing a minor upgrade upgrade: 4.1.4.1 to 4.1.5.2. So I doubt the problems he was facing are connected to ones that might appear when upgrading from 3.x to 4.x. 

Secondly, I highly doubt that missing avatars are an expected “symptom” of the upgrade from 3.x to 4.x you just have to live with. It’s more a symptom of a misconfiguration during or after the upgrade. But it needs to be checked out on the specific installation, i.e. by checking the broken URLs and the expected and actual location of the files on the server and their permission settings. If you can’t do that yourself, I suggest to open a support ticket instead of asking your users to re-upload every avatar. It can probably easily be solved by just re-configuring a path setting somewhere. 

[Square Wheels]

I agree I rushed to delete the missing ones, sorry for not waiting for help.  I turned the site back on and it looked terrible.   The active people have replaced them and more than 1 topic pickingon me has been started.  

[Woodsman]

This still can be fixed quite easily, just time consuming as hell.

1. Via FTP go into uploads and download your profile sub directory.

2. Go into each user account missing the avatar right click the missing avatar to bring up its properties. Copy image info namely the image.png - jpg ect.

3. Find that image in your downloaded profile directory and replace it.

I have had to do this many of times on my local and live sites... Time consuming Yes! and I only have 365+ images.

[Rheddy]

@Square Wheels, if you're the root admin, you really need to put a stop to your members picking on you. It's inappropriate conduct by the members of your community. I've banned new members on my community for doing that and I've also imposed severe restrictions on other long-term members for acting in that way. It's just improper conduct, which every root admin should take seriously.

@opentype, I'm going by what I was told by IPS Support. That the settings, which also mean the avatars and other IPS features, are reset internally. It's something that can't be protected against. This isn't something I just pulled out of thin air, but that was relayed to me via a support ticket.

[Square Wheels]

3 minutes ago, Morisato said:

@Square Wheels, if you're the root admin, you really need to put a stop to your members picking on you. It's inappropriate conduct by the members of your community. I've banned new members on my community for doing that and I've also imposed severe restrictions on other long-term members for acting in that way. It's just improper conduct, which every root admin should take seriously.

Go to the cycling site in my sig.  That's what we do, the site is just for fun.  Picking on each other is part of who we are.  It's a fairly active site, over 250,000 posts after starting it 2 years ago.  We'll hit a million posts in a little over 4 years.

[eGullet]

2 hours ago, Morisato said:

I'm going by what I was told by IPS Support. That the settings, which also mean the avatars and other IPS features, are reset internally.

I don't know who at Invision told you that avatars being deleted is an expected consequence of upgrading to v4, but on our site it didn't happen. Some avatars got stretched out if they were too small, but overall the avatars were correctly migrated. I'm not sure that "reset internally" really has to mean "deleted," I'd guess that rebuilding avatars was one of those background processes that ran on the upgrade.

[Rheddy]

@eGullet, IPS Support never specified what settings were reverted but that it was simply a system-wide side-effect from the upgrade of IPS4. I had experienced a number of post-upgrade errors that was unrelated to the settings reversion but that because IPS4 was such a monumental change over IPS3, that the settings reversion (and other factors of the IPS software) would affect the installation after the upgrade. I'm actually still working through the post-upgrade errors as well as the settings reversion. But that my community is also informing me of minor issues as they discover them.

I imagine I'll be sorting through the post-upgrade for the next week or two. I went through this when IPS upgraded from IPB 2.3.6 to IPS3. But, even the avatar system is completely different than it was with IPS3. Simply uploading the avatars, I doubt will work. I'm sure it may work for some accounts, but not all of them.

@Square Wheels, I have no doubt that's how your community is. But, there's just certain behavior on my forums that I don't tolerate. I went through the problems before with my community when I first created it and I had to finally put my foot down and create a zero tolerance policy. The problem is that when visitors or new members see established members carrying on like that, they tend to take it a step too far. I just decided to cut off that kind of behavior, early on, with my community. It just sets a bad precedent when you allow that kind of behavior to run rampant. For some like myself, I just see it as disrespect aimed at the person who created the site. My community has been with me for 11 years now and they respect me enough to act respectfully. When someone new registers and they start acting out, I simply modify their posted content and warn them against posting such messages in the future. It also depends what kind of mood I'm currently in and if they were honestly unaware of what they are posting. But, I can tell if a new member is just being sarcastic, mean or if they're honestly unaware of how my community operates.

[eGullet]

48 minutes ago, Morisato said:

I had experienced a number of post-upgrade errors that was unrelated to the settings reversion but that because IPS4 was such a monumental change over IPS3

Oh, I understand that, believe me! We are still in the process of sorting things out too, and I'm sure Invision support is sick to death of all of my tickets. And while it feels like pretty much everything else broke when we went from 3 to 4, avatars are one of the things that actually didn't. So what I was getting at was simply that the software was supposed to deal with the avatars correctly, and the fact that it didn't was a bug, not a "feature."  

[Rheddy]

Tell me about it. I've went through more support tickets for upgrading to IPS4 and post-upgrade errors and trying to get them corrected than I did with IPS3. Personally, I wasn't trying to be difficult but I've seen some really dumb questions asked on other forums about upgrading, lost avatars, defaulted settings and downgrading. Someone actually thought that by simply restoring their IPS3 database that they could downgrade that way.For me, I wasn't prepared for IPS4 defaulting the majority of my settings but I was able to restore the settings before anyone discovered them. Sometimes, I'm a bit hard-headed in my replies.