Forum Layout & Functionality is REALLY Broken

[Mikeiw3001]

Hi guys,

Yesterday I converted most of our tables in the DB to InnoDB at the suggestion of your help pages, and everything seemed OK.  Today I logged in and did a bit of Admin-type stuff as you do, and everything was normal.  Then I went to the Reports and tried to delete a post that had been made six time in error (possibly an initial symptom of what's to come?), and it wouldn't work.  I got a 500 error.

From that moment on, the forum has been all over the place, looking weird, buttons in the wrong places, buttons not working, and headers duplicating, with the CSS totally out the window at times.  I've a feeling that it's a corruption to the DB somewhere along the line, but I don't know what to do in order to fix it or who can help, so I'm sat here panicking and wishing I'd never started it. 😪 I made one attempt to repair a random table, which returned with a message to the effect of "InnoDB doesn't support repair", which was a bit of a shock.

I think we're going to need someone like a sys admin to go over our DB and fix it, but I'm hoping that you might be able to give us some ideas before it starts costing us lots of money.  We've got a bit of a cash float, but it's not a huge one.  I'm terrified of losing 14+ years of posts, wisdom and nonsense. 🤮

I'm desperate, and the forum is unusable as it stands, so if you can give it some prompt attention, I'll be appreciative 🙂

TIA

Mike.

[IveLeft...]

Are you access details in your client area up to date - IPS will take a look and advise - access details not up to date prolongs the pain

[Jim M]

Looking at your community as a guest, I am not seeing any present issues. However, we would require access to further inspect the software and provide a recommendation/solution.

We would need to look further into this for you, however the access details on file appear to be incorrect or missing. Could you please update these details by visiting your client area, selecting the relevant purchase, then clicking "Review/Update Access Information" under the "Stored Access Information" section. 

We look forward to further assisting you. 

 

[Mikeiw3001]

Hi Jim,

The weirdest of weird things is that as soon as I managed to post a message on the forum to tell everyone it's bust, it started to behave better.  I'll update our login details and see how things go for an hour or two.  I've not tried any admin-related things since, so don't know if that's working for me or not.  Does seem really strange - the fact that it was all fine earlier was another thing that made me wonder, but I put that down to expiry of caches and that sort of thing.

Thanks for the quick replies in the meantime 👍

Mike.

[Jim M]

Unfortunately, I am not seeing any errors logged in the system itself so anything that was happening was happening on the server-end and preventing the software from running/logging. Seeing as this kind of resolved itself, I would recommend reaching out to your hosting provider to see if they were having any issues at the time this was encountered.

[Mikeiw3001]

Hi Jim,

It's a blooming mystery to all concerned, and at this moment, I'm just happy that it's gone away.

In the meantime, Hosting Support (Host4Web) have converted the rest of the tables to InnoDB from MyISAM, so we're running on a full set now.  With one exception.  There's a table in there that's formatted in BLACKHOLE with zero entries, and that's tricking your Support tool into telling me we still have non InnoDB tables.  I've added some info below, and am wondering if it has any relevance, needs fixing, or can be deleted?  As it's ibf_core_log could it explain why our logs never seem to record any problems?

Name: ibf_core_log  Rows 0 Type: BLACKHOLE Collation: utf8mb4_unicode_ci Overhead: unknown

If you can let me know the answer to that, and whether it's needed, I'll get it resolved from my end with a bit of luck 🙂

TIA

Mike.

 

[Jim M]

Your Engine Type is set to BLACKHOLE. Unsure why your hosting provider set that or how it got set as such but it would need to be changed appropriately to InnoDB.