Elliot Marx

Anyways please Invision Board cancel my membership. This software is way too high maintenance for me. I wanted to make this a full fledged forum but it's been impossible to get off the ground. The software is so picky that if I want to upgrade, I need to make sure the upgrade happens every two weeks or so or I run the risk of doing an upgrade that will crash everything. Forum topic reference formats have changed several times making it difficult to create external links. This time I went from 4.7.1 to 4.7.4 and got punished for it. The only thing I've been able to use the forum successfully is doing my own posts with pictures. I can do the same with my own website design and there are plenty of social media options as an alternative. 15 years of this. I figured give this a new start, got excited that the hCaptcha was supposed to allow guests posts while blocking spam but then my whole forum got infected with Cialis this gof--kme that etc. so I had to stop. Good luck to whoever is still using this service. It's just not for me.

That's only one of the problems. I clearly have plenty of memory on my host provider. If you guys want to keep saying it's my problem and my stupidity, good for you. I'm an engineer with 30+ years of experience. I've built the rest of my website and databases to go with it and it has zero issues. I redid my entire website to work with PHP8.0+. And any time I did run into an issue, the web host worked me through exactly what I needed to do to fix it. In my 15 years of dealing with Invision Power Services, all I get is you're stupid, you did this wrong, it's someone else's problem. And not even the courtesy of a phone call. Sorry I'm DONE DONE DONE!!!!

Between the host iPage and Invision Community, each side is saying it's the others responsibility... Great.

@Randy CalvertI'm using PHP Version 8.0.19. That should not be the problem. And for #2 I have no clue how to do what you're saying there. @Marc Stridgen Yes I'm still having issues. I also got the admin login wrong so got locked out from the upgrading process for 14 minutes. But I managed to update my access details for FTP so let's get started there ASAP please. Now when I try to recover my password I get the following error: An error occurred (500 Error) We're sorry, but a temporary technical error has occurred which means we cannot display this site right now. Error writing file '/tmp/MY12Y0t4' (Errcode: 28 - No space left on device) You can try again by clicking the button below, or try again later.

This is the response I got from my web host: "I have checked your website and I did not find any server-side issue. The error you are seeing in your website is not caused by any wrong server configurations. It could be a website design/coding issue. The best option is to contact a web developer to get this checked." And this is the page they referenced which shows the settings. This particular page loads fine: https://www.audioinnovate.com/forums/info.php

My forum stopped working after I did the upgrade from 4.7.2 to 4.7.4. This is the error I get: An error occurred (500 Error) We're sorry, but a temporary technical error has occurred which means we cannot display this site right now. You can try again by clicking the button below, or try again later. Try again Seems nothing I do at this point can fix it. I've tried to go back to previous working versions and even tried installing a clean forum with zero data and I still get the same error. Checked the host name, user name and password, everything seems to check out.

Marc, All I did was run the firmware upgrade and the entire forum went down. So I tried restoring both the backup and doing a fresh installation and neither work. Terabyte - system requirements all checked off green.

Database and backup are from version 4.7 I've tried installing version 4.7 and 4.7.4 as clean installations and even a blank forum doesn't run. Where do I find the server error log? I just keep seeing this one error message. And if I continue to wipe out the directory and reinstall it keeps happening. I've made sure it points to a database with the correct username and password too.

I have backups of the forum and database and tried to go back to an earlier version but even restoring these doesn't work now. It's really hard to track down what's broken now...Hopefully someone here can help! I imagine it's something obvious that I'm missing.

I've started a fresh installation and this is the error I get: An error occurred (500 Error) We're sorry, but a temporary technical error has occurred which means we cannot display this site right now. You can try again by clicking the button below, or try again later. Try again

Hello Marc, Perhaps you have some idea here?

Hello Randy, Thanks for explaining but then that means the "Post before register" function is useless for my forum. It just makes things so difficult for people who want to interact with me that most won't even bother and will just go straight to social media like Facebook and Instagram or email / call us directly to interact. The issue is social media posts and threads are all "here today gone tomorrow" blog style posts, and email / phone calls are all 1-1 communication only so I need to recommunicate and repost this info. I want to pull customer interactions over to our own forum so I can pin Q&A style interactions and easily reference them from our main website. The product I'm trying to sell is already difficult and complex, so this style of interaction will allow customers in the know to help customers who are struggling, and sometimes even present us with useful tips we can easily share with others. For me a more useful guest function is "Let the admin know I want to post this" along with the contents of the actual post. Then I could log into control panel, see a notification at the top when this is happening, and reject or approve the posts one at a time. Please do something about this. I'm getting weary of not being able to get good use of a true "forum" for over a decade. The forum still just functions for me mostly as a basic non-interactive website.

Yes I have post before registering set. In order for this to really work, I'll need to get email notification or I'll have no idea if someone is trying to post. Is this possible to set up? Elliot

Yes I believe for sure it is stopping some posts but it is a real nuisance. I can only try to do a better job at getting people approved more quickly to post. The email verification for sure weeds out spammers much better than before. Elliot

I posted about the exact same problem. hCaptcha is useless for filtering these out...

I was so excited that I could "finally" allow guests to posts while at the same time not have to worry about spam. After trying this for 3 weeks, I ended up getting hundreds of spam messages so I finally gave up. All of the usual Cialis/medical ads/porn crap I thought hCaptcha was the solution but apparently it doesn't do much of anything. I feel so let down by this...is there any way to allow guests to post which won't invite ridiculous levels of spam? I noticed the email verification is good in weeding new members...is there any way to set up a similar email verification for guest posts? Elliot

OK in the future I will backup the forum and database first, upgrade a test site before going live, and ask for help right away when the upgrade runs into an issue. Especially now it's clear the Invision Community is super helpful. I'm pleasantly surprised how easy it is to get good responses very quickly, even for issues that are quite complex. Thank you all!

Fair enough, I can only imagine how difficult it is to create and maintain a forum while at the same time keeping out bad actors. Not to mention the variety of hosting platforms. And I thank Invision. I originally was hesitant to come on the boards doubting whether or not posting would be helpful or useless. A combination of Invsiion and others on the board have helped resolved every issue. I did as Marc suggested and deleted database files until finding what broke. After deleting the most recent database files generated by the 4.6.12.1 installation and changing the 'sql_tbl_prefix' setting from '' (blank) to 'ibf_' the forum was still ok. But deleting the 'orig_ibf_', 'x_utf_ibf' seemed to break the forum. My guess is that these 'orig_ibf_', 'x_utf_ibf' were also somehow linked to the 'ibf' files, and that these prefixes were selected automatically many revisions ago. Basically I've been using Invision Board since 2009. Used it based on the recommendation of Mark Settle who at the time was running Skratchworx. Besides the recent upgrade, the one other memorable one was when I went from a 3.x to 4.x. I hadn't kept up with the regular upgrades so this is where things got super complicated. I've also been using Startlogic as a host and switched over to iPage which is essentially run by the same company, but I needed to switch over to iPage so I could have a VPS account. I'd like to use the forum more in the future. One thing I've notice that's improved a lot is the verification system for adding new members. It seems to be doing a much better job of screening out the spammers and only letting through the legitimate customers. This is a big change from a few years ago. I'm taking note and will start getting more people approved and on the board as a result. But one thing still plaguing me is the second I allow guests to post, I get tons of porn spam posts. Might be related to the web host, not sure. But if this is fixed I'd be really happy and have a much more active site. For now things are up and running smoothly again so thanks everyone for your help! Elliot

Sorry your forum isn't really that easy to use and requires any database manager to watch over it like a hawk. Also it requires every single upgrade to be done religiously and timely or there are major problems. I had to manually reformat hyperlinks since there were changes in the hyperlink and image embedding format. Suddenly I found my posts containing a bunch of garbled test as a surprise replacement. Ideally the forum upgrades should be doing the reformatting but apparently that's the way I get penalized by not doing every single upgrade in order and right away. One time I missed a few upgrades and spent weeks chatting with the web host and Invision to try to get things sorted out because the upgrade didn't work. If you want to blame me the customer that's up to you. I'm just sharing my experience. I'll give the database fix a try again.

In order to get my database working, since the admin section of my 4.6.11 installation was damaged, I had to do a fresh installation to 4.6.12.1. Then in order to get my forum working again, I switched the 'sql_tbl_prefix' from '' to 'ibf_' in the conf_global.php file. Now the problem is I have some 578 tables in the database. It's getting unwieldly. So I tried to delete the files which didn't have the 'ibf_' prefix - all of the non-prefixed database files plus the 'orig_ibf_', 'x_utf_ibf'. But once I did this the forum stopped working - a notice came on that the forum was in the process of updating - and I had to restore the databases which I thought weren't being used but apparently triggered this and stopped the forum from working. Is there a safe way to prune out unused database files? Every upgrade is getting more and more painful to manage!

Well thanks for your attention. At least I've learned a whole lot about maintaining databases in the process 🙂

Hello Nathan, Mark, Yes thank you for your help. This did work but not without a bit of grief. The first time I tried the adding the directory /home/audioinnovate/public_html/forums/uploads which is the valid one on the new server and deleting /home/users/web/b1038/sl.audioinn/public_html/forums/uploads which is the invalid directory from the old server. The storage settings all updated to the new directory but then suddenly I was stuck with "forum upgrade in process" messages and the forum stopped working. I think this may have something to do with the fact that the "move files automatically" setting was checked. So the way I had to fix this was to delete my entire forum and then restore the entire forum. Fortunately this process only takes a few seconds with all of the backup files on the web server. Interestingly the admin control panel then said I was up-to-date with version 4.16.12.1, and when I went back to the storage settings, they were blank. So I deselected the "move files automatically", restored the /home/audioinnovate/public_html/forums/uploads directory under storage settings -> configurations, and all started working. I think it would be advisable for anyone dealing with broken file systems - especially moving from one server to another where this is clearly possible - the "move files automatically" box should NOT be checked or the whole process will crash as the forum searches for a non-existent directory. Anyways, thank you so much for pointing me in the right direction. All resolved now! Elliot

Hello All, Thanks for your help especially to Miss_B! Here's what I did: 1) I copied the database from my old web server to the new one. Old database has table prefixes "ibf_" 2) I did a fresh installation of 4.16.12.1 and didn't specify any table prefixes 3) Then I changed this line of code in config_global.php file 'sql_tbl_prefix' => '', To the following code: 'sql_tbl_prefix' => 'ibf_', So far so good...everything on the forum including the adminCP works beautifully. But then I got notification I needed to upgrade from 4.16.11 to 4.16.12.1. I tried this and here's where everything falls apart: Somehow the forum made use of this hidden directory from my old web host. /home/users/web/b1038/sl.audioinn/public_html/forums/uploads During the upgrade process, it says that this directory doesn't exist so the whole upgrade gets stuck. My form exists globally at www.audioinnovate.com/forums. So when I go to my server, the forum files exist at home/audioinnovate/public_html/forums. When I use FTP, home/audioinnovate is the root directory. I have no way of creating or accessing any files at a lower directory level. For all practical purposes, this weird /home/users/web/b1038/sl.audioinn/ directory doesn't exist anymore because I moved files off of another server. I have no way of either creating or accessing this weird directory. I searched all of my database files and fixed the string /home/users/web/b1038/sl.audioinn/public_html/forums/uploads to /home/audioinnovate/public_html/forums/uploads but that did NOT fix the problem. So my question is: How do I fix the upgrade process so it's no longer searching for this hidden directory /home/users/web/b1038/sl.audioinn/public_html/forums/uploads and instead searches for the existing directory /home/audioinnovate/public_html/forums/uploads?

Hello Jim, All good, Miss_B answered my other thread!