Inundated with errors, other forums down, since 2.1.3

[rusbowden]

Hi Liver,

I have been actually patting both ends of the horse, you guys because the forums went down while updating from the SMF admin area, either at that moment or within an hour of it. Whether server or SMF issue or something else, the most logical approach is to work with the idea that it had something to do with SMF or quite possibly the server somehow, an avenue that Kindred falls heavy on, and which you have given a suggestion about. And A2hosting, whichever end you feel they are, has been addressing the ticket each day too and has a link to this thread we are in. Here is their response to the server resources question which you brought up yesterday:

Hello Rus,

Sure. I have reviewed the current and past resource usage of your account. Your cPanel account resource usage has been very minimal and we are not seeing any incidents of resource limits were hit.

You can verify the same from cPanel > Resource usage:

https://www.a2hosting.com/kb/cpanel/cpanel-logging-features/resource-limit-information

In case of any concerns, please feel free to reach out. We are here for you and would be happy to help!

Good customer service there anyway.

Anyway, now that the horse stuff is out of the way, I noticed in the cpanel that I would have received an email if server resources had been exceeded, which we now know they had not. I wish I could recall the two items that were increased, and maybe that would make sense to you. But we did go back in time and that did not help. If you recall or noted from yesterday, I posted this message from A2 hosting dated Nov 29, in response to Kindred:

Hello Rus,
Thank you for your patience. The restoration is completed however, the site still shows a missing /home/wzzdbhie/public_html/Settings.php file error. I have checked older backups and they also do not contain the Settings.php file.

I recommend uploading a new Setting.php and reconfiguring it (such as database name, user, database password, and directories path) so that site could start to load properly.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at any time. We are here 24/7. We'll be glad to help!

That restoration was done following a phone call when we jumped back in time a few times in the Server Rewind area of the cPanel. I will ask if the restoration was a full or selective restore.

Yes, it may come to going into each forum and following the errors back. But there is something very blind about this kind of fiddling, not knowing the cause. As noted above, my inclination would be to do what Kindred suggested for the SMF forums, but to do that to the Phorum forum first, to see if that gets it going again. I'm not sure why Babilu 3 at this point needs a new engine, transmission, and undercarriage.

Thanks.

Rus

[rusbowden]

Hi Steve,

You say that it is not possible that updating the SMF forum would screw up the other forums. But that is precisely what happened. Undeniable. Above, in my response to Sir Osis, you can see that it was not a server resource issue anyway that the SMF updating collided with, nor that the remaining issues are a result of.

The process, what I am talking about is the process the SMF software uses in its updating. It's a question that must be looked into, because it was upon clicking "install" that all forums went down. SMF has serious issues we know of, simply in the fact that using the Package Manager to update mods can cause an inundation of error messages. No one has yet thanked me for bringing this issue to the fore. We know at least this.

And hacking would not necessarily have shown up on the day of the hack, if we broaden the idea of a hack to include viruses. But that was not the point. Really, the site is acting as if hacked, and I called it inadvertently hacked, an oxymoron I thought would be picked up immediately within the conversation to be a description of the effect of the damage done.

But Steve, my entire tone was about getting into the brainstorming of this very serious issue, to bat things around the tabletop. Not to get into a entanglement of pride among high IQ people. I've got my creds, you've got yours. Kindred and the others theirs. We're all smart cookies here, from excellent schools.

Let's get the site back up and running. It was running great on November 27 and into November 28. All forums were down when I clicked "Install" the second time in the package Manager area, on that fateful day, in that fateful moment. What caused that?

What is it that Kindred suggested that you think I have not done? And why would you say that I am unwilling to do it? My note was that it would be wise to wait until the server resource question was answered.

Thanks.

Rus

[rusbowden]

More logic.

Nothing you have said is logical. Your ranting gets more and more incoherent.

And for the sake of this argument, which is not an assertion, let's say this very screwed up state was caused by a hack. Just say. My question becomes, could the coders at SMF or any of its passionate 3rd parties, devise a way to hack a site and screw it up? Sure you could. Could it happen instead by a miscoding, or a misplacing of something in the update process within the SMF software? Sure it could. Did it? We don't know.

Oh, but we do know. Every mod that gets submitted here is checked very thoroughly for security and bugs before being approved. We take security very seriously. What you are saying is so ridiculous and preposterous.

You are embarrassing yourself by stating things that are simply not possible such as when upgrading one forum, it screw up the other forums. Or Smf coders hack, miscode and misplace or some other nonsense like that.

Do not put yourself into debate spaces when you are not well educated enough on the subject to argue. Like that you show your ignorance. But again, if you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn

Hi Doug,

It would be illogical for me to respond to your first comment. I'll take it that it is coming from frustration.

Also, I am not here to debate, but I sense that others feel the need to. We are all here to resolve the issue, no? And I sense that your response is coming from the idea that you need to debate something. The very issue seems to be a spark, as if an insult to SMF. But it is what it is, and it happened the way it happened. I'm sorry.

Is there embarrassment from Sir Osis for suggesting that it may have been a server resource issue, when it turns out it wasn't? Why would I be embarrassed for stating what took place and then engaging in conversation with ideas in how it could have happened and how it can be resolved?

All the checking and double checking of the mods has given me trust in the past that on November 28, I could update to the new versions very likely with no issue, no reason to open a ticket at A2hosting nor start a thread in here. But one thing we know for sure, is that using the Package Manage to update the above-itemized mods caused an inundation of errors, a few hooks problems, that never should have happened.

Is this understandable from my vantage, the one whose forums are now down? Absolutely. I read through all the changes made in the patch going from 2.1.2 to 2.1.3. And some were issues missed in 2.1.2, even though the checking and double checking process is sound. It happens all the time, here, there, and everywhere. This very forum that we are discussing in, is where users reports yet-unfound issues. I've now done this too.

Thanks.

Rus

[Steve]

You say that it is not possible that updating the SMF forum would screw up the other forums. But that is precisely what happened. Undeniable.

Not undeniable ... coincidental maybe because something changed with the server at the same time ... what is undeniable is that updating one forum would not take down others.

I can feel (I have not discussed this with them) that my fellow Support Team members are getting weary of this topic (as am I just reading it) because it seems to go nowhere fast.

We're not here to debate anything. You report a problem with as much information as possible concerning the problem and we suggest solutions. That's it.

If we feel your problem is a bug, we take further internal action. This is not the case here.

I'm done interjecting comments here. I'll let those with more knowledge than I continue on if they wish.

[rusbowden]

Hi Kindred,

I have mentioned to A2hosting.com, that in this thread here at SMF, that you have been bringing up the server issue. In this post, you lay out your "logic". I'm going to take your response and include it in full in a response to A2hosting in the open ticket.

Note here that part of your logic is that there had to be a collision of the SMF updating software with the "very very bad" server configuration in order for your train of thought to be true, or an extreme coincidence. Yet, the inundation of errors that ensued, indicates trouble on the SMF side that was unrecoverable in the moment, that surely could have been either the spark itself or the result of the spark that started the errors spreading throughout all forums. But let's both stay open, and see how A2hosting responds.

Thanks.

Rus

[Kindred]

No. There us literally nothing to indicate that the smf update had any effect on the other sites - because it literally can not.

All your attempts to say that "it had to be smf" are based on the completely false assumption that smf COULD affect those systems.  Since it can't,  that means all of your attempts to debug have been wasted, since you need to be looking somewhere else.

At this point, I am repeating myself for the tenth time and I'm done.

My only remaining suggestion to you is- restore the entire site -- all directories -- to a date when everything was working.  Say a month ago.
If you still have a single issue,  then that proves the problem is a server issue.

And with that, I'm done.
I will ignore further comments here until you can tell me that you did a full restore to a previously known, working date backup.

[Sesquipedalian]

Hi @rusbowden,

The error message that comes up when I go to your root site, https://pochapocha.com, says that the index.php file is failing because it cannot find a Settings.php file in your document root directory.

This suggests that you have a copy of SMF's index.php file in your document root directory even though SMF is actually installed in a subdirectory.

The most likely causes of that are either:

• You previously installed SMF there and then performed an incomplete uninstall or moved the SMF files elsewhere, or...
• You manually copied the index.php file from your SMF subdirectory to the root directory.

To fix the issue at your root directory, replace that index.php file with something else that doesn't try to load SMF files that don't exist. If the reason that you have a copy of SMF's index.php file in the root directory is that you want your SMF forum to be the default for your site, I recommend that you instead use an .htaccess file to automatically redirect traffic aimed at your root site to the desired destination.

Dealing with the issues in your other forums is more difficult, because the software of those forums is not our expertise, but hopefully the following will be helpful.

On your https://pochapocha.com/cc/ forum, the error message indicates that you are missing a file that was expected to be found at ./include/cache/file.php. You will need to restore that file in order to fix the error. The folks at Phorum will be better able to help you with that than we are.

On your https://pochapocha.com/babilu/ forum, the error message indicates that a database inconsistency has occurred. To fix that you will need to restore a backup of a previous version of that database.

Moreover, the type of error involved seems to suggest (but I cannot say this with any certainty at all—it's just a hunch) that you have somehow gotten multiple forum scripts writing to the same database tables, causing conflicts. If that is the case, then after you restore the database from a working backup, you should check all your forums (and any other scripts that might be using a database) to make sure that each one is using its own separate database. If two different scripts have been using the same database for a long time and you are worried about losing data for one or the other of them if they don't both have access to the database in question, then make a duplicate of the database and give each script access to its own copy.

No error message is displayed on your https://pochapocha.com/babilu2/ forum, so there is no insight I can give you at all about what is going wrong there. You will need to ask the folks at Vanilla for troubleshooting advice.

Regarding how all this happened, it is very difficult to imagine how it could have. Obviously something occurred, or you would not be in this mess. But from our perspective, where we don't have knowledge about the configuration or history of changes on your server, it is nearly impossible to guess how. We do know that SMF, when installed and run as designed, would never interfere with software files stored in other directories or with data in databases other than its own.

But if, for example, copies of SMF files had been copied and pasted into other directories, or symlinks between one directory and another had been created, or if multiple PHP scripts had been told to use the same database, then all manner of unpredictable results might occur. I don't know for certain whether any of those situations apply in your case, but whether it was one of those situations or something else, the only rational explanation available to us from our perspective is that something has happened on your server that broke the "when installed and run as designed" condition.

Whatever has caused the problem  probably was not something done by your hosting provider, or else we would expect to hear other similar complaints about that host. It wasn't something about SMF, either, or else we would have heard about similar problems from other users before—and seriously, I have never, ever heard of SMF doing anything even remotely like this. Instead, all signs point to something unique to your site. I've made some guesses above about possibilities for what that might be, but without a lot more information we aren't in a position to know what breaking changes were made on your site.

So, in order to move forward, I suggest asking yourself about unique changes you might have made to your site that could have enabled the boundaries between different file directories and/or database contents to be crossed. The changes might have been recent, but they may have happened further in the past and simply not caused obvious issues until now.

I hope that helps you to diagnose the issue.

[rusbowden]

Hi Kindred,

Thanks for your help. I'm still awaiting word from A2hosting on your ideas about server issues. I wish I could have shifted you out of "debate" mode and your false idea that I think "it had to be SMF" or that I have been asserting such. Indeed I have been very careful with my wording so that you would not be jumping onto that false read of my issue. However, SMF is still suspect until cleared. The problem availed itself because, or possibly began because I clicked "install" in the SMF admin area.

Thanks again and happy holidays.


Rus

[rusbowden]

Hi Sesquipedalian,

Just what this conversation required, a mad doctor. Your insights are terrific.

So here we are. And no, I have never done these 2:

The most likely causes of that are either:

You previously installed SMF there and then performed an incomplete uninstall or moved the SMF files elsewhere, or...
You manually copied the index.php file from your SMF subdirectory to the root directory.

However your further comment has me thinking back:

So, in order to move forward, I suggest asking yourself about unique changes you might have made to your site that could have enabled the boundaries between different file directories and/or database contents to be crossed. The changes might have been recent, but they may have happened further in the past and simply not caused obvious issues until now.

At first I said to myself, "no" as above, but wait. All files were migrated to A2hosting in February. Could the migration process have failed and then not shown itself until I clicked "install" just 9 days ago.

I also need to think like a doctor, and to not treat all suspected illnesses at once. So, I await the server questions that Kindred offered earlier, which I put into the A2hosting ticket, specifically this:

Just to be clear -- my logic was not narrow. My logic is very clear and - in this case - the logic is linear.

I am considering what could have happened -- and what you keep trying to suggest LITERALLY CAN NOT HAPPEN with any code distributed on the SMF website (either neither updates or validated mods).

There is something very wrong with your server configuration -- and the fact that the HOST can't figure it out is very concerning, and I would consider moving hosts.
Neither vanilla nor phorum use Settings.php -- neither of those systems should be looking for that file. They each have their own configuration file needed to be included within their directory structure based on the root of their installation.
SMF does use Settings.php for configuration. Like the other systems, SMF requires that file to be in the SMF FORUM root directory, not the server web root.

The fact that you have some system looking for a Settings.php int he WEB ROOT, indicates that something is wrong. TRUE.
The fact that the file did not exist in any of your backups indicates that whatever is NOW wrong happened at some point recently. TRUE.
There is nothing that would cause a correctly configured system of ANY of those three softwares to do this.

Therefore, by logic, the ONLY thing that would cause this is a bad (very, very bad) configuration change to your software setup or your server setup.

Since you claim that everything worked and that you made no changes to your configurations - by logic, the only remaining possible cause is a sever change of some sort by the host.

Thanks very kindly. You bring mad hope.

Rus

[Sir Osis of Liver]

You mentioned earlier that at some point you changed paths in Settings.php from the SMF directory to the other forum directories.  Did you try running the again upgrade after changing paths?

[rusbowden]

Hi Sir Osis,

No. At the time, I did not think of it as so consequential. It was an attempt with the guidance of A2hosting, availed nothing, so I took it out, and it was just one of the other forums. I then changed Settings.php to babilu/Settings.php in the public_html/index.php file, and that was no help either.

Are you suggesting that I uninstall and delete all the mods I upgraded and reinstall them? I surely will try that if you think it might help, even 1%. My thought before going into it, maybe later when the members have gone to bed, is that it would be the same as when I first updated them, before fiddling with Settings.php, and the forums were down.

Thanks.

Rus

[Sir Osis of Liver]

What I'm seeing is that the SMF forum is the only one of the four that's up and running.  There doesn't appear to be anything wrong with it.  Nothing you do to that install should have any effect on the other forums.  If Settings.php is anywhere other than in the SMF root directory, it would be ignored.  If you were still having problems with the SMF forum, you could upload a clean set of files, remove all hooks, and reinstall mods, but that's not the case, and none of that would affect the other forums.  You're not reporting any problems with the current SMF install.  If you originally upgraded from 2.1.2 to 2.1.3 in package manager, that's just a mod install, it can't do anything outside the SMF directory.  There would have to be something seriously wrong with your server configuration for the upgrade to crash the other forums.

[rusbowden]

Hi Sir Osis,

Because the SMF forum came back to life early on, and now the inundation of errors have been addressed, all looks like it is running fine. How much do I trust that? Does it have a trail of brake fluid behind it as it heads toward a stone wall? Well, that's why I mentioned the 1%, in the sense of what good would it do to repeat? Indeed, I had to go in and take out hooks and files left behind that belonged to old versions. I addressed the hook problem with Scrolling Buttons, well after that mod was uninstalled and deleted, and never replaced. So disowned junk was being left behind. But I have reinstalled all others mods, without the same crashing taking place, clicking "install", then a white out, instead of a page saying how the install was successful. Pretty and suddenly disappointing.

At A2hosting, each time I ask a question, a different person responds. I do not think I have gotten the same person twice in all these days. I'm hoping that, even if it takes some time, Kindred's query gets bumped to someone who can address it well, nothing back yet.

Thanks.

Rus

[rusbowden]

Not to take up bandwidth, but to let people who are helping know what's going on at the other end of the horse, here is my latest in the messaging at the A2Hosting ticket.

~~~~~~~~~

Hi Yatin,

Back on the very first day that the forums went down, November 28, I was on the phone with an A2Hosting specialist and we went into the rewind area, going back trying different days. We only really had to go back one day, because all forums were running great on November 27, but we went back even further.

Back on November 29–and it is crazy how long this is taking isn't it, as most of my site has been down now for 11 days–I got this message in this ticket below:

~~~

Hello Rus,
Thank you for your patience. The restoration is completed however, the site still shows a missing /home/wzzdbhie/public_html/Settings.php file error. I have checked older backups and they also do not contain the Settings.php file.

I recommend uploading a new Setting.php and reconfiguring it (such as database name, user, database password, and directories path) so that site could start to load properly.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at any time. We are here 24/7. We'll be glad to help!

Usman H.
Support Specialist
A2 Hosting - Our Speed, Your Success!
https://www.a2hosting.com/support

~~~~

Most of my site has been down now for 11 days and as above, the restoration has been attempted.

What caused all this damage across all forums? The SMF people say that even though it occurred while updating mods in the admin area of their software, no way could that have affected the other forum software–the Phorum software for /babilu and /cc and others nor the Vanilla software for /babilu2. Is that true? One SMF specialist says it has something to do with "very, very, very bad" server configuration.

I'm sitting now trying to brainstorm, coming up with remote possibilities and impossibilities, like what if one of the SMF mod zip files had a virus in the file itself.

We are at a point that if we do not know what the issue is, everything becomes a shot in the dark. If all software at the Vanilla and Phorum forums were running fine on November 27, and using that date or days previous do not resolve the issue, then what could have gone haywire? It seems like a virus or a hack, even though I do not think anything like this was purposeful. But that led another SMF specialist to at least suppose that the damage was done in the past, maybe by a misplaced file going into the wrong forums. And those other forums, /cc, /babilu, and /babilu2 are lesser used.

I'm not sure how else to brainstorm this problem, or what resources I have to help me do so.

Thanks again,
Rus

[m4z]

As Sesq pointed out in detail, your SMF forum seems to work fine now, and we can't help with everything else, which you probably caused yourself, because:
- we are not the Vanilla developers
- we are not the Phorum developers
- we don't know why there's an SMF index.php in your public_html directory and you don't either, or you're not willing to tell us
- we don't know about your historic or current setup and you don't either, or you're not willing to tell us


Unless you share more about your environment, nobody will really be able to help you with your front page problem (how did the site work before, what was on your front page?), and all the other problems don't concern us.

Maybe there's something being lost in translation here.

In post #5 above, you state that you seem to have caused the index problems yourself. Why not undo that change?

Maybe start from the beginning and explain in more detail.

[Sir Osis of Liver]

the site still shows a missing /home/wzzdbhie/public_html/Settings.php file error. I have checked older backups and they also do not contain the Settings.php file.

This is one of the things that doesn't make sense.  Settings.php is an SMF file.  According to Kindred, neither Vanilla nor Phorum use a Settings.php file.  Assuming you're not running anything other than the four forums in this account, the only Settings.php which should be called is in https://pochapocha.com/babilu3/, the SMF forum root, which it is or forum wouldn't load.  Something else is trying to load Settings.php from /public_html. 

Just checked the other forums again, https://pochapocha.com/cc/ is reporting missing file:

require_once(./include/cache/file.php): Failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/wzzdbhie/public_html/cc/common.php on line 230. 

That's a missing file in the /cc/ forum.

https://pochapocha.com/babilu/ is reporting:

Notice: unserialize(): Error at offset 1824 of 2748 bytes in /home/wzzdbhie/public_html/babilu/include/db/mysql.php on line 380

Fatal error: Uncaught mysqli_sql_exception: Duplicate entry 'mod_onlineusers' for key 'PRIMARY' in /home/wzzdbhie/public_html/babilu/include/db/mysql/mysqli.php:149 Stack trace: #0 /home/wzzdbhie/public_html/babilu/include/db/mysql/mysqli.php(149): mysqli_query() #1 /home/wzzdbhie/public_html/babilu/include/db/mysql.php(426): phorum_db_interact() #2 /home/wzzdbhie/public_html/babilu/mods/onlineusers/onlineusers.php(62): phorum_db_update_settings() #3 /home/wzzdbhie/public_html/babilu/common.php(1907): phorum_mod_onlineusers_common_post_user() #4 /home/wzzdbhie/public_html/babilu/common.php(674): phorum_hook() #5 /home/wzzdbhie/public_html/babilu/index.php(21): include_once('/home/wzzdbhie/...') #6 {main} thrown in /home/wzzdbhie/public_html/babilu/include/db/mysql/mysqli.php on line 149

That's a database error in the /babilu/ forum.

https://pochapocha.com/babilu2/ is still wsod.  That's an unspecified server error in /babilu2/ forum, should be logging a server error..

None of them are reporting missing Settings.php.  None of this affects the SMF forum, and nothing in SMF is causing this.  Those installs are broken, you have to fix them one at a time.  If you are still seeing the missing Settings.php error, look for an old SMF install in /public_html, or an .htaccess or cpanel redirect from an old install that was never removed.  In either case that should not crash the other forums.

[rusbowden]

Hi m4a,

I've asked before what details have I left out.

If I did nothing at the Vanilla forums and nothing at the Phorum forums, then what would it have to do with them?

All forums went down if not seconds after clicking 'install' in the Admin of the SMF forum, and it was within I'd say a half hour that I connected by phone to A2hosting that we discovered the other forums would not load either, chances are great that it had to do with clicking 'install'. It would be extraordinary to believe that all forum software s failed by themselves in that time frame.

I understand that insight to the cause may be outside your ken, it is outside everyone else's so far too.

I assure you that it has been months since I have had any need to go into my cpanel until Nov 28 after all forums would not load.

The issue has never been that a file from the SMF software was found in each of the other forums. It's that the Settings.php file, which only SMF has, was being called for in the other forums.

What more do you want to know? Ask me specifically what you need and I will respond.

I've not had a front page in years. The links into my site are to specific forums.

Thanks,

Rus

Typed with my thumb in an SE phone while on a moving bumpy train

Rus

[Sesquipedalian]

The issue [is] that the Settings.php file, which only SMF has, was being called for in the other forums.

This is true about the error at your website's root. The index.php file there is failing because it is trying to find a Settings.php that doesn't exist.

But this statement is incorrect regarding the errors happening on your other forums. None of the error messages on your other forums say anything about trying to load Settings.php or any other SMF file. One says that a Phorum file is missing, and the other says that its database is broken.

In order to fix the problem at your website root, you need to edit or replace the index.php file in your website's root directory. (To be clear, your website's root directory is /home/wzzdbhie/public_html, and the file I am talking about is /home/wzzdbhie/public_html/index.php.)

To do this, you should use your FTP client or cPanel's file manager to download a copy of /home/wzzdbhie/public_html/index.php from the server to your local computer, and then open the local copy in a text editor in order to view the contents.

The next step depends on what you find inside the file.

If the file contents look like this, then you can simply delete /home/wzzdbhie/public_html/index.php on your server and (optionally) replace it with something else.

If the file contents do not look like what I linked you to above, then you will need to edit the file in order to remove the line that says

Code Select Expand

require_once(dirname(__FILE__) . '/Settings.php');Then upload the edited copy to the server.

As for fixing the errors on your other forums, you will need to talk to the support teams for those other forum software packages. We are not experts in other software and cannot give you advice about them.

[shawnb61]

For all of these to have broken at once, I would suspect that an environment level setting was changed somehow.  E.g., where previously you had a redirect that no longer existed, or, your forum's base directory was somehow changed.  That limits the root cause to things like:
- php ini settings, like basedir
- apache settings like document root
- .htaccess, possibly a redirect was added or was broken
- possibly a redirect within index.php within document root that points to your smf installation (I've seen those)

There is nothing in SMF that updates any of the above.

A very tiny number of mods update .htaccess.  I'm pretty sure nothing you listed above does, though.

Bear in mind this issue lasted beyond apache/php being recycled.  Other than updates to .htaccess, there is nothing SMF can do to do make a permanent change to your apache or php environment, like basedir or document root.

Note that some hosts allow "local" changes to your php environment.  If this is the case, you will see php.ini files throughout your folder structure.  If you see those now, it's possible your host enabled this feature, producing unexpected results.

To me, this feels strongly like a change was made to base environment configuration somehow.  I would focus on changes to php.ini (global or local), httpd.conf and .htaccess.

But again, as has been repeated many times, SMF does not - and in most cases cannot - update these files.

[rusbowden]

Thank you Shawn & Sesquipedalian,

As I have just a little time today to address the issue, I'm at the other end of the horse, at the A2hosting ticket.

I just checked dates. The index.php file in public_html was no longer calling for a Setting.php file to be in the other forums on December 2, two days before this thread here at SMF began. In the message was this:

We have checked the required details and can no longer see the missing settings.php error, but the webpage https://pochapocha.com/ was crashing due to a "Parse error" as shown below:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected token "/", expecting "," or ";" in /home/wzzdbhie/public_html/index.php on line 200

It appears that the index.php file present at /home/wzzdbhie/public_html/ was using an invalid entry within line 200 which appears to be causing the issue. For reference, the screenshot is attached to this ticket reply. We are not specifically sure of the fix for it and it might need to be consulted with a professional developer or the Simple Machines Forum (SMF) script support for the correct code to use in the said file and line to resolve the error without breaking any other instances of the website. If the developer needs anything to check/configure from the server side, please do not hesitate to let us know and we'll be glad to help you with it.

We hope the information was helpful. Looking forward to your reply.

Thanks for getting back to us. We'll be glad to assist you further.

I have attached their screenshot. If I were to start again, I would begin with this. My next message to A2hosting was on the 4th, saying that I began this thread here.

Todays message begins this way:



Nothing has changed with the server configuration on our end of things. There haven't been any changes done that would have affected your site or caused this issue for you. The fact that everything was working fine up until the mod updates you did suggests that something happened during the update process.

It has been said that I have been flogging the wrong end of the horse here. My response was that I have been been patting both ends. Now, I am finding myself caught in a faceoff in the movie sequel The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly Website. What happened after I clicked "update"? Did the SMF software cause the forums to go down, or was there something existing in the system configuration that was touched off to cause the forums to go down.

Does the attachment help?

Shawn, Sesquipedalian, et al, thank you thank you. I am trying to go in sequence. I have a response to make at A2hosting, about the sequence of events, as I did here in this response, about how the index.php file was calling for a never-existent Settings.php file in the other forums.

RusYou cannot view this attachment.