Forum maintenance: Aug 2021

[Martin Blank]

Yep, I'm still alive. More details to come.

Forums have been updated to phpBB 3.3.4. This was necessary to prepare for the eventual (and maybe near-term-ish) migration to PHP 8.0. OpenSSL 3.0 will probably come around the same time, so I'm trying to avoid having too many issues at once.

I may have found the intermittent 403 Forbidden problem. One of the Apache mods I have is called DOSEvasion (or mod_evasion). Its defaults are usually OK, but when paired with PHP-FPM, it's apparently easier to trigger them. I've backed them off a bit and enabled some logging to track it. Hopefully, it makes things more tolerable.

Edit: Forgot to add that the server was down for a day or so when it was moved to a new colo. We're at the same host, but the old colo's hardware didn't support VMWare ESX 7 and wasn't going to. So for those that tried to connect during the move and time to re-IP (extended because I can't tell 9 from 0 sometimes), that's why.