Cretster

Thanks Jim, I think I did apply it recursively but I'll check to be sure.
They do have a function for "fixing" file ownership and I did try that but also didn't seem to change anything.
I shall check these bits though and then contact them further.

Really appreciate all the advice from you guys here once again, thanks. 🙂

Thanks Jim, appreciate it.

Thankfully at long last I have my forum back online again, so obviously I'm super stoked about that and appreciate very much all the input on here.

The only big issue I still seem to have now is that no images (in respect of avatars and image uploads/gallery images) appear to be working after this migration and getting the forum online again.

When I look at Chrome Dev tools I'm seeing a 403 access denied/forbidden error for each image that tries to load like this, so I'm assuming it's a permissions issue on the directory they're stored.

I've temporarily tried using a 777 permission on the forums/uploads/ directory, to test if that might help but unfortunately it hasn't, so I'm not sure what else might cause a permission error for pictures in the forum?  Or have I got the wrong directory perhaps for doing that?  Just about every setting in the storage settings section of ACP does point to there anyway.

Anyway, if I can sort that out then hopefully I'll have some very happy members now we're on the latest forum version.

Since you're upgrading too, you'll need to complete that process (that's why you're seeing a missing table).
The issue with PHP sessions will need to be fixed with whomever manages your server. It could be something like a misconfigured path for storing PHP sessions, or the path isn't writable. The host will know more about that.
`TEXT_ENCRYPTION_KEY` is only used for some areas, such as storing username and password data in Commerce, or storing the answers to the security question MFA. If you don't use either of those, you don't need to worry about that.

Thanks Stuart, pretty sure I did try it on 8 also since that was what the server had been changed to iirc when I first got alerted to site being down and tried to manually run the upgrade.

I will double check though of course thanks.  It may be that there was another error that I already resolve on 8, then tried other versions, but haven't retried since possibly, so I'll revert once I've confirmed that.

Thanks again!