The Safest way to upgrade a heavily hacked forum?
 

A Crucial and Interesting thread for all of those who have a heavily modified forum!

Ok we are on a 3.5.4 and have had upto 40 hacks installed, some hacks required template changes and some required file editing.

Now i know how to backup a database and i know how to restore a database, so no need to tell me that! :) lol

What i want to do is, i want to get rid of all the hacks and just keep the default settings like, member post count, posts, reputation etc I want our heavily modified forum with over Threads: 12,036, Posts: 432,169, Members: 1,577 basically what we want is a fresh new forum with all our posts, members and all other default settings.

We are planning to upgrade the forum to a 3.6.5 or possibly a 3.5.8. I have tried and tested some methods over the weekend inside a test directory. Ive had some luck but not so great as some hacks are still lingering within the default database tables.

Does anybody, or has anybody ever upgraded a heavily modified forum? Remember i want to loose all hacks ever installed, files and from the database.

What is the way forward and how will you do it?

P.S: No spam please, i would like to read some constructive posts. Cheers. :up:

couldnt you just revert all the templates via your style manager that should take you back to the core files of vb with no mods then upgrade using the version you want upgrading to

Good point, i thought of that too.

What about the following:

1. Plugins? (yes you can uninstall them)
2. What about plugins that create extra database tables which after you uninstall them the tables still dont go away? (yes you have to manually remove them)
3. What about plugins that add extra tables and also modify and add other tables within default vbulletin database tables? (what do you do then?)

Ok assuming you have done all of the above, barr no.3 when you install and revert all templates and run an upgrade surely an error of some sort will show up after installation? (yes i did all the above and the last point, no.3 did give me problems where i had to manually apply a "disable all hooks/hacks" string within the config.php file in order for the forum to work.

Even after i had removed all hacks it still gave me problems, knowing there is a table somewhere within my forums default database tables which still holds some resemblances to the hacks was worrying.

to upgrade you have to overwrite all your default vb files with the new versions so if there are any you have manually edited they will be overwritten.

or you cold install a fresh version of vb and use impex or something, i've only ever upgraded so dont know to much about that side of things

Yes reverting templates and uploading original files is not a problem. Im talking about the database side of things ive highlighted in my above post. :)

1. uninstall any and all plugins/products/etc.
2. revert all templates
3. backup
4. upload/overwrite forum files
5. run upgrade script (updates database)
6. verify everything works
7. close forum (not necessary/optional)
8. remove entire forums directory (not necessary/optional)
9. upload forum files (not necessary/optional)
10. open forum and enjoy.