How to reactivate ancient phpbb 2.0.22 site?

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korey99
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How to reactivate ancient phpbb 2.0.22 site?

Post by korey99 »

Hey all-

Many years ago I had a phpbb installation, and after a few years I didn't need it any more. So, I think I made it read-only, but I'm not sure. Well, I'm in the process of retiring old projects, and I thought I'd like to take a look at the content, and maybe grab a static local copy, before shutting it down.

The problem is, somewhere along the line it stopped working. I checked in MySQL, and the tables are still there. I checked the filesystem, and everything looks alright there too. But when I try to visit any php script I get a 500 error. I created a new subdomain on my webhost, uploaded a "fresh" copy of 2.0.22, and it gives me exclusively 500 errors as well. I haven't messed with any of this for more than a decade, so I'm rusty. I checked the credentials in config.php, and they're correct. I made a simple "hello world" php script, and it works fine.

I suspect maybe the old 2.0.22 version doesn't work with PHP 7.4, which is the oldest version I can use on my web host. I got the version number from phpbb_config, where the "version" row reads ".0.22" - so I'm guessing that's 2.0.22. The time period is about right.

Can anyone recommend a procedure to where I can get this back up and running? I thought maybe I could run through the upgrade path to the current version, but since I can't run anything on the existing code I don't know that it'd work, upgrading the tables, etc.

Any ideas?
Last edited by thecoalman on Sat Apr 16, 2022 6:51 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Moved to Support Forum
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Re: How to reactivate ancient phpbb 2.0.22 site?

Post by thecoalman »

Download the latest release, extract it and open the docs folder. There is directions for converting a 2.0 forum in INSTALL.html.

When converting/upgrading the php version only needs to be supported by the version you are upgrading too and the latest release supports 7.4+.
“Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I have found several thousand things that won’t work.”

Attributed - Thomas Edison
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