david.hathaway@gmail.com

Gads, I should have taken notes but a few key things, make sure the entire db is converted to innodb and all tables and columns are utf8mb4_unicode_ci (i had a ton that were mb3, likely due to the age of the forum). I used the manual approach, but still had to refer to the sql backup of the old forum to create a handful of tables that the update claimed were missing. It still took 5 attempts at a manual upgrade as it would time out, but it would pick up where it left off. I also had to restore the uploads folder as some part of the upgrade wiped out 10 years of user photos. Backups are your friend.

As a followup, this board is now upgraded and seemingly working properly, however, gotta say, after 12 years of maintaining this board, this was easily the most painful upgrade ever.

Well, I am nothing if not persistent in trying to get this upgraded, what "should" this table be, anyone got an sql command to create it? Table 'revkites_revkites.ibf_core_widget_areas' doesn't exist /home/revkites/public_html/forum/applications/core/setup/upg_107400/queries.json - query #2 UPDATE `ibf_core_widget_areas` `core_widget_areas` SET `widgets`=? WHERE app='core' AND ( controller IN ( 'login', 'register' ) ) /home/revkites/public_html/forum/applications/core/setup/upg_107400/queries.json - query #2

Ah the misery continues 😉 What has happened to the file linked here: Some or all of the columns in your database are not using the utf8_unicode_ci collation (ibf_blog_blogs.blog_settings is utf8mb3_unicode_ci). Download the UTF8 Database Converter

They were all converted to that as well.

FYI, changing all tables to innodb didn't help at all.

That'd be great, thank you, pretty frustrated at the moment with this.

Well, it'll be interesting to see if they come up with a fix or at least a fixed upgrade path as I just trashed my database as well with that "upgrade". The article linked above would be fine, except no amount of phpmyadmin love via optimize or repair is working. Thankfully I do have a backup but...no update path.