United Cavers Exploration Team Test

OK, The forum is back now.  Please report any problems to me.

There was an error reported during the database reload, but having checked the tables I think everything reloaded OK.

Note that the markers which show which forums you have visited have been lost - so everything is marked as new. Just use the 'mark read' tab to reset these as needed.

Hopefully with this re-base any more updates of the 2.1.x version should go on without a lot of messing about. Version 3 is unlikely to be released till mid 2027 - that may involve rather more effort :-(

Dave

I won't be going now

Yes ... sounds fun.
A newbie so maybe a bit short of kit.

On Sturday 11th April 2026 the website and forum will be down to apply an update from 08.00 till 12.00 (and possibly longer if things don't work out).

Any changes to the forum after 08.00 will be lost.
 
Please do not try to login (that includes those with admin privileges!)

Cheers,
Dave

I'd like to come along for this, also new and will need to borrow a helmet if possible.
Thanks!

Quote from: Tino79 on Apr 04, 2026, 10:59 PMNewbie here, I would love to come, might need a helmet and torch if possible

No problem 

Newbie here, I would love to come, might need a helmet and torch if possible

I'd like to come please

Just to provide an update on timescales on forum maintenance.

I had hoped to do the update this weekend, but extensive testing on a backup system showed a problem in updating that caused the format of the website was completely screwed up and I have been working to identify the cause.

I saw this issue during an attempted in-situ update from 2.1.4 -> 2.1.6 but fixed it by a full clean install followed by restoring parts of the database. Everything seemed to work OK and we have been running OK since. Doing a full clean reinstall is a tedious activity as there are a lot of steps followed by restoring some of the database tables from the production system. With the previous successful update I only restored the members, main forum board files, topics and messages ( about 9 tables) and had no problems - the website came up OK.

This time I tried to do the same on the test system, but realised there were quite a few more database files which needed to be restored (about 22) as we are using more facilities of the forum and I had missed a few others. Restoring these blew up the formatting of the forum pages... After a lot of rollbacks and database reloads I have found that the 'themes' table causes the problem. This contains user preferences for location, gender, social media links etc. I didn't copy this on the previous update and so everything on the forum was OK.

It least I now know how to avoid the problem and I will try to identify the exact cause and a fix so that people keep their settings. Once this is done I will probably go through a full clean install again as that way we clear out any cruft.   

So currently I will pencil in the update to be on Sat 11th April - the forum will be unavailable from 08.00 till at least 12.00

Dave

I'll be there 👍