Updating...
 

Alright I am taking over the tech side of a forum, and I am kinda new to vBulletin but not to programming itself. I recently purchased a book dealing with vBulletin called, "Building Forums with vBulletin: A practical guide to the web's favorite discussion system.". Well I read through it and am actually still in a little bit of a fog regarding upgrading to newer versions of the software. What I would like to know is if there is a website that can give me more information, I don't mind reading so if you have any recommendations please feel free to shoot them my way. Thank you for any help you all can give me.

Updates are rather simple.

All you have to do is to enter the members area (using the customer number/password you were given at the time of purchasing a license), then download the latest version for your version tree. 3.8.5 is the latest stable for 3.x and 4.0.4 is to be soon the latest stable in 4.x.

Then, you take the zip package and upload the contents of the upload files, overwriting all of the files on the server. You may like not to upload favicon.ico and config.php.new : these files aren't part of the upgrade

After you've done that, you point your browser to http://yourdomain.com/forums/install/finalupgrade.php (or wherever your forums are installed) and run the upgrade script. Once that's done, you are finished upgrading to the latest version of vBulletin you downloaded.

Hope this helped you.

Alright, I followed your instructions but seem to still be having problems. I upload the entire contents of the Upload folder and then point my browser to its destination and it only upgrades to the version that is already installed.

When I log in to my clients vBulletin members area to download the files I noticed that under the status/ type column it reads the following:

Inactive - Expired
vBulletin 3.x Forum (Owned)

Does this have anything to do with me not being able to upgrade?

You can't upgrade, because your license is inactive. You will need to pay for the vB4 license to update.

That's what I was thinking, I'll have to call the client now and explain this all to him.

The forum I am working on is running 3.7.4, I can download patch 3.8.4 Level 2 but it will not install for me. Is that because of the account being inactive?

Now when I go to the webiste there is nothing that is being displayed, is that because of the license as well?

^ this.
Or, you could get your own license, and just overwrite the files with your own and upgrade yourself.

This shit is actually pissing me off so I am going to walk away from it for awhile. LOL. I ran the update script and now the page doesn't show unless you go to the index.php.... I already hate this software. Or I could just be an idiot.

Can we see the url to your forum?

Also, did you get any errors during the upgrade? And did you make a backup of your db prior to the upgrade btw?

The .com shows up as a blank page, but if you go to /index.php it shows up fine. Yes I made a back up of the db into a zip file.

What are you on about?

If he can download 3.8.4PL2, he should be able to install it. There's no callhome in the install script to determine if a license is active at the time of install.

(Also, 4.0.4 is soon to be the Stable version? Please provide your definition of "Soon". 4.0.3 isn't even out.)