Upgrade Advice Needed

[barry1947]

Hi Everyone,
I have got a couple of problems that I now need to address with my installation which has run well for around 8 years. I am currently on SMF 2.0.17 with MySQL 5.7 and PHP 7.3 There has been a lot of tweaks that I have made to get the system to act as I would like, such as creating a Likes system and the ability to upload mp3's into Members Web Sites that I have also created etc.

I have started suffering with some character problems where it replaces the unknown characters with black on white Question Marks.

I tried to upgrade to 2.0.18 but got errors. One of which was eminating from the Theme that I am using and some others also.

I did some analysis by installing a blank 2.0.18 and testing it for the unkown characters and it works fine.
I then checked differences in the Database and there are differences in the structure of the database tables and fields all around UTF8.

So I tried to run a full upgrade to 2.0.18 and ran into a problem on versions of languages files so I deleted all of the language files in default/languages and uploaded them from the 2.0.18 upgrade files but it is still the same. In settings.php it is English. and English is the only installed language. I tried to install French but I do not see that it has worked.

So all in all I am currently thinking do I continue to upgrade to 2.0.18 or will I be better to go for the latest 2.1 RC. because either way there is going to be a significant amount of work for me to do.

Any insight into this will be great.
If I need to do the upgrade how to I get that working
Many thanks for your time reading this. I will appreciate any help.
Best regards
Barry

[Doug Heffernan]

Personally I think that it is better to hold on upgrading to 2.1. till it reaches the final/gold status.

What errors did you get btw when you attemted to upgrade to 2.0.18? If they are third party themes/mods reletared you can post at their support topics.

[vbgamer45]

The question mark issue means you probably should convert your forum to utf8.

[barry1947]

Personally I think that it is better to hold on upgrading to 2.1. till it reaches the final/gold status.

What errors did you get btw when you attemted to upgrade to 2.0.18? If they are third party themes/mods reletared you can post at their support topics.

Hi Doug, ScheduledTasks.php
Many thanks for getting back to me.
Your info re which way to go is good. Thank you for that too.

The straight upgrade from 2.0.17 to  2.0.18 is (I think) quite easy to fix. it is just a search that is failing for two replacements in ScheduledTasks.php. The second one is failing on script.js in a third party theme. It appears that the script has been minimised so once again a search for replacement fails because extra spaces etc are removed. Again that should be OK to fix. However I am concerned that the Question marks are appearing so I would be no better off in that respect.

The large upgrade tells me that there are old language files in the system and I cannot seem to clear that, even when removing all of the files in /themes/default/languages and replacing them with new ones from 2.0.18
There is a skip option that I have clicked. That asks for the admin user name and password which I put in and it goes back to the beginning. One thing that I did not try was to enter the user name and password for the database. Could it  be that?

Many thanks for getting in touch on this.
Best regards
Barry

[barry1947]

The question mark issue means you probably should convert your forum to utf8.

Hi vbgamer45.
Many thanks for your input. I think that you are right about the utf8 is probably right. I have run the admin change to utf8 it and it did not seem to make any difference.

I then did a clean install of 2.0.18 and tested a post with data that created the problem originally and it showed correctly.
I then did an ssh datadump and uploaded it to the 2.0.18 database and it was back to not working again.
I will try running the "Convert HTML-entities to UTF-8 characters" in 2.0.18 and see what that does.

Once again Many thanks for getting in touch on this.
Best regards
Barry

[vbgamer45]

It would fix new characters going forward I believe.