Error updating to 2.0.14

[axemanBB]

my forum site: hxxp:www.asarnas-arme.com/forum/ [nonactive]

The problem is fixed temporarily, as I was able to get my web host provider to restore everything on my site to a backup from yesterday, so I'm back on SMF 2.0.13.  However, I would really like to do the update, so I need to figure out why it failed.  Help!

Before you read my short story below, I may have found the issue.  My site provider runs PHP 5.3.6.  Does 2.0.14 require a higher version?  If so, looks like I can't update.  If 2.0.14 should be able to run on 5.3.6, then read on, and hopefully someone can help me figure out what I need to do.

I ran the update today through the package manager.  Everything tested fine on the package manager before I installed. After install, however, my forums went white. Blank.  No more forum, no error message.  I tried it on Mac OS 10.12.4, latest versions of Opera, FireFox and Chrome, and I tried it on Windows Home 7 Premium Service Pack 1 also, all showed the same problem.

I didn't do a View Page Source.  My bad.  That may have spelled out what was broken.

My site is hosted on Yahoo (Aabaco). They have a restore feature, where I can restore individual files to a previous version, restore the database, etc. I restored all the files in my forum folder that were changed in the update. The blank, white, empty screen now presented with an HTTP 500 error.

And...that's what happened.  Any idea about what I can do to get the update to work?  Anything server-side I need to check or change? Any .php files I need to manually change something in, etc.? I didn't find anything on the forums here about a similar issue with this update. 

Thanks for any insight.

[lurkalot]

  If 2.0.14 should be able to run on 5.3.6, then read on, and hopefully someone can help me figure out what I need to do.

According to the info given when you install the patch, yes its supposed work with php 5.3. But I gather from reading some of the support topics here it seems in reality this isn't the case, and needs a minimum of php 5.4.  Whether this will be addressed in the 2.0.15 patch I don't know. https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=553969.0

But if it's any consolation, I have the exact same issue with one of my hosting packages, where my sites are running on php 5.3 

[Arantor]

PHP 5.3 stopped getting support fixes in August 2014. PHP 5.4 stopped getting support fixes in September 2015. 5.5 stopped getting fixes in July 2016.

Maybe it's time your host did something about this.

[lurkalot]

PHP 5.3 stopped getting support fixes in August 2014. PHP 5.4 stopped getting support fixes in September 2015. 5.5 stopped getting fixes in July 2016.

Maybe it's time your host did something about this.

Yep, I'm working on this right now. I mean looking at new hosting options. 

[Stefan1200]

Sourceforge is still using PHP 5.3.3, after updating to SMF 2.0.14 I got an HTTP ERROR 500. I found out that this is because of the changes in the file Subs-Db-mysql.php. Unfortunately I can't find the http error log entry (Sourceforge don't give realtime access to it).

Are there any security related changes in the file Subs-Db-mysql.php? Currently all other files are updated, but I use the previous version of the file Subs-Db-mysql.php.

Update: Error log entry:
[Tue May 23 15:09:52 2017] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] PHP Fatal error:  Function name must be a string in /home/project-web/dictionarymid/htdocs/forum/Sources/Load.php on line 133

[Arantor]

No, there are not. It's just the way the dev team made it PHP 7 compatible, inadvertently breaking all 5.3 compatibility.