Broken board description links after upgrade

[LunaticSoleil]

Hello,

i am trying to upgrade an SMF 1.1.13 forum of an online gaming community. The forum contains 100000+ topics and 1000000+ messages and about 500 boards. The target version of SMF is 2.1.2,

The upgrade process takes quite some time but seems to finish at least after increasing MySQL max_allowed_packet during conversion. During the conversion I get a timeout at always the same conversion step but it seems to continue after clicking "retry".

After upgrading - everything seems to work with only one problem:

A bunch of board descriptions contain image links to other sites. These links are not displayed correctly but show as broken HTML code. After opening and saving the affacted boards in the administration area the image links get "fixed" and are displayed as expected.

Is there any better way to fix all boards? Fixing many dozens of boards manually would be a tedious work.


Example description text before opening / saving the board in the administration area:

Code Select Expand

<a href="http://other.site.org/include.php?path=start.php" target="_blank"><img src="http://forum.site.org/img/Forum/home.gif" border="0" alt="Homepage" title="Title text" /></a>Forum description
After opening / saving the board:

Code Select Expand

[url=http://other.site.org/include.php?path=start.php][img
alt=Homepage]http://forum.site.org/img/Forum/home.gif[/img][/url]Forum description



Thanks in advance

LunaticSoleil

[Diego Andrés]

HTML is no longer parsed in descriptions, you're going to have to change that to BBC's

[LunaticSoleil]

HTML is no longer parsed in descriptions, you're going to have to change that to BBC's

Could this work?

Loop over all boards through php and call html_to_bbc() or do I have to use an other function?

[Arantor]

The problem is that you actually need to do more than just call html_to_bbc, but make sure the correct escaping chain is called. The time to write such a script *correctly* is actually probably not that much shorter than opening the boards in new tabs (Ctrl-click is good for this) then having one hand over the end key, the other on the mouse to click save.

(I say this as a veteran of having had to trudge through many hundreds of manual fixes in my time.)

[LunaticSoleil]

The problem is that you actually need to do more than just call html_to_bbc, but make sure the correct escaping chain is called. The time to write such a script *correctly* is actually probably not that much shorter than opening the boards in new tabs (Ctrl-click is good for this) then having one hand over the end key, the other on the mouse to click save.

(I say this as a veteran of having had to trudge through many hundreds of manual fixes in my time.)

Doing this for 500+ boards would be erorr-prone (not all 500 boards contain these links but a high percentage) . Most of my mistakes are during "stupid" and repeating tasks. I know that it will not save much time (or even take longer) to write a script for this but once done correctly it gives me peace of mind that I did not forget a bunch of boards.Time is not the most important factor for me as I am doing this for free and I prefer interesting tasks over endless clicking sessions.

As a bonus I would learn something about SMF which could be handy to keep the forum up to date and secure and prevent it from rotting once again for a decade - being a security nightmare until the next great update.

Besides the missing conversion of html to bb code the upgrade worked surprisingly good. Kudos to the SMF developers! Once I did am upgrade that needed about 5 intermediate stops (upgrading step for step, using different PHP and MySQL versions)

I suppose I will try to find out the correct escaping sequence and resort to manual change if I do not succeed.

Thanks for the help.

[Steve]

500+ boards

Good lord ... 

[xVolcanic]

Doing this for 500+ boards would be erorr-prone (not all 500 boards contain these links but a high percentage) . Most of my mistakes are during "stupid" and repeating tasks. I know that it will not save much time (or even take longer) to write a script for this but once done correctly it gives me peace of mind that I did not forget a bunch of boards.Time is not the most important factor for me as I am doing this for free and I prefer interesting tasks over endless clicking sessions.

As a bonus I would learn something about SMF which could be handy to keep the forum up to date and secure and prevent it from rotting once again for a decade - being a security nightmare until the next great update.

Besides the missing conversion of html to bb code the upgrade worked surprisingly good. Kudos to the SMF developers! Once I did am upgrade that needed about 5 intermediate stops (upgrading step for step, using different PHP and MySQL versions)

I suppose I will try to find out the correct escaping sequence and resort to manual change if I do not succeed.

Thanks for the help.

Or you could keep a backup file to run it to the latest SMF version, maybe while you were running the installation few files may be damaged and that issue leads you to that error.!

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

That didn't really make much sense to me. Unless you were trying to suggest cloning the forum and testing on a copy install, which is actually a good idea.

[Kindred]

xVolcanic,

Please read the thread before responding  (and no need to quote an entire post)

The reason the "error" happened was explained (and intentional) there was no file damage or corruption.