You may have noticed that the site went down again for about a day. I had my suspicions about what the problem was, so when Tess called the host, I was on part of the call. As it turned out, I was wrong about the cause of the problem, and the problem was easily fixable … for now. We’ve been using php 5.6 for years, GoDaddy automatically upgraded us, and the customer service agent was able to downgrade the platform.
The problem is: GoDaddy won’t continue to support php 5.6 forever, and we don’t know how long. They recently pulled support for 5.2. MySQL also pulled support for the version of MySQL we use (also 5.6) this month, and will be pulling support for 5.7 in 31 months, though GoDaddy may well support them for longer. After that, it’s a jump to version 8, which is dramatically different.
We’ve been using the same version of phpBB for years because the reputation system won’t work with anything newer. Both avi and I looked at the reputation system and concluded that it would be too much work for us to port to a different reputation system. And of course we all love our rep points, so we’ve kept the forum software antiquated.
However, when the day comes that GoDaddy ends support for 5.6, we can probably upgrade the forums to a newer version of php, at the cost of losing the rep. Unfortunately, the website itself was written years ago in php 5.6. I’m not interested in porting the website to php 8 and I know avi’s not, and other solutions may prove similarly excessively demanding for the userbase we now have. So, if there’s any articles you want to save, you should save them now, though I’ve checked and the Internet Archive has also preserved them.
Basically, this is a heads up that at some point in the next few years—and unfortunately we don’t know exactly when—we’ll be losing the reputation system and likely the main website as well.