Problem after original site name had to be changed

[jhmeyers]

Settings.php identifies our software version as SMF 1.0

We have one forum on a site formerly known as www-xxxxxx-edu

[kindly translate "-" to "." in this entire post,
and note that your forum software refuses to allow us
to post even a site name obfuscated with "xxxxxx"
telling us "Sorry, you are not allowed to post external links"
to the first 45 attempts we have made to ask a simple question
which HAS TO indicate a site name to make our point,
as well as to say how we actually tried to adjust one of your settings,
so please try to imagine what we're trying to say,
or else tell us how to get around this infuriating posting obstacle, thanks]

That entire site was recently superseded by updating DNS
so that both www-xxxxxx-edu and xxxxxx-edu now point to an entirely new web server,
while a new DNS entry old-xxxxxx-edu points to the original web site,
which still contains our original, unmodified forum,
which we want to continue using on the old, original web server.

We are not trying to migrate our forum from the old site to the new site,
but to simply keep it running on the (renamed) old site.

Accordingly, we updated our Settings.php in just this one line...

$boardurl = 'guesswhat:old-xxxxxx-edu/ourforum'; # URL to your forum's folder. (without the trailing /!)

When we next visit our forum on this old server,
we see the correct data being displayed,
but no images and apparently no CSS or javascript files being found.

When we display the "source" of a page in our web browser,
we see that many URLs in the generated page have been correctly updated,
apparently by the one line we modified in Settings.php,
to refer to hxxp:old-xxxxxx.edu [nonactive] in place of the former www-xxxxxx-edu;
however, every URL which refers to anything in the "Themes" subdirectory
contains only xxxxxx-edu instead of old-xxxxxx-edu,
and therefore refers to our new web site instead of the original site,
causing all "Themes" files to fail to be found,
and the resulting pages to look quite awful and unusable.

We have not been able to find what else needs modifying
so that the URLs for images, CSS and javascript in the Themes subfolder
will contain old-xxxxxx-edu instead of just xxxxxx-edu

Can you understand what we've tried to get your forum to allow us to post,
and then help us with it?  Thanks!

[jhmeyers]

I found a tool for adjusting other settings that are not in Settings.php
(nor do I have any idea where the adjusted settings are):

http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Repair_settings.php

This tool displayed additional independent URLs
(not found in Settings.php) for "Themes" and images,
and allowed those URLs to be changed
(I removed the tool, for security, after using once).

[MrPhil]

tell us how to get around this infuriating posting obstacle

That is done deliberately to trip up spammers who would otherwise flood this forum with advertising. It goes away after you've made some number of posts (10 or so?). With a little bit of creativity you can come up with http(colon)//www(dot)myforum(dot)com or something like that. The idea is to format it in such a way that it doesn't get automatically translated into an active link, which is what spammers are looking for.

repair_settings.php is the proper way to update settings such as your URL. As you've discovered, it does not handle URLs inside of themes. I'm unable to get to my forum to check, but somewhere in the Admin pages is a place to update your theme URLs (I don't recall how to get to it or what it's called -- maybe someone else can chime in with the information).

[jhmeyers]

Thank you for your kind reply and suggestions.

Repair_settings.php did actually allow us
to update the URLs for Themes and for images (which are also under Themes),
and did actually solve the problem!

We compared Settings.php before and after using Repair_settings.php,
and found that the URL updates for Themes and images
were not saved in Settings.php -- we don't know where they actually
are saved, but we do know that our forum now displays as it should,
and that when we view the "source" of generated pages,
the URLs involving Themes (CSS, images, and javascript files)
have all been corrected with the changes made via Repair_settings.php,
so "nothing succeeds like success," even if we do not know
where the additional URL updates got saved -- we are guessing
that they are within the database, as we can't find any other modified site files.

No one who created our special-purpose forum
(for posting available academic community housing) remains on our staff,
so we are very glad for this site and for the "on-line manual"
for providing enough information for us to patch it for a while,
even though our software version (1,0,8) is apparently so out of date
that its imminent "end of life" appears to have been announced.

Thanks again -- problem is solved
(the status of which I have attempted to mark)