vBulletin Problems after running Tools.php

[El Queso]

A few days ago, our forum stopped working, with a message from vBulletin that the Datastore was corrupted. All pages, even the AdminCP. The message suggested that we should run the "bitfield" option in Tools.php to fix the issue.

I had to upload tools.php, as well as the Install folder, in order to do so. I ran the option indicated and received some errors about mysql_specialchars being deprecated (we are running php 5.4.3, vBulletin 4.1.4) and have made some previous modifications when we upgraded our PHP version to get rid of those problems in the forum itself. We had forgotten about this issue when running tools.php.

Running the "bitfield" options completed, even with the errors, and it seemed to fix the issue with the datastore.

But it left the forum with problems. At first the problems were pretty big. A number of plugins that we've created and added ourselves didn't work at all, including a banner ad manager. Just for grins, I went in and turned off one of the Products our Plugins were attached to, and suddenly most of the functionality re-appeared correctly. I turned on the one product I'd disabled and it continued to work correctly as well.

Later, I realized we still had two problems.

1) We have a "Front Page" via vbAdvanced (vBa CMPS) that is not working. The configuration data for the CMPS is showing up in the AdminCP correctly, the Front Page is configured correctly, and all modules we are displaying on the Front Page are configured correctly. When we try to access the Front Page (via vBa's replacement index.php) we get a vBulletin error that says it can't find the page specified.

2) Users cannot add attachments to posts. When they click to create a new post, the Attachment area under the post editor is simply not there. I've reviewed permissions in user groups and can't find a reason that anyone who is logged in and able to create a post should not have permissions to access attachments. All previously-uploaded attachments (i.e., those uploaded before our problem) display and act correctly.

We run two other forums that have almost identical configurations and I've compared those forums to the problem forum and can't find any differences. Obviously this must have to do with some sort of caching/pre-parsed text issue in the database, but I'm damned if I know what at this point.

I'm a developer, although with a couple of decades of experience writing c#/.Net code and only a few years' experience developing with PHP and vBulletin. I have a development environment set up on my local machine, though I have yet to run the "bitfield" option in the tools.php script locally in order to try to "break" my local environment. That's probably my next play, so I can debug directly and try to see what's happening, but I was kind of hoping to avoid having to do that

Anyone have any suggestions as to what to look at?

[RichieBoy67]

Ok, I only had a minute and did not read your entire post but did you try running a repair on your database? Also, update that VBulletin version!

[El Queso]

I haven't repaired yet. I'm waiting for our admin to make a copy of the database so I can take a look locally and try to reproduce the problem in my dev setup. Plus I need to take the forum down and we're in the busiest part of our day and wanted to wait until a little later.

I have to admit that sometimes MySQL seems a little flaky over what I'm more used to with MS SQL, but I just can't imagine what kind of a database issue would cause my symptoms, with the two specific things that I'm having problems with. Being a hail-Mary, I'm going to do it, but it's not a priority for the moment.

As far as the version, yeah. We've made a lot of modifications to the forums, and some of it was done by guys who modified the code files directly, not understanding some of the more complicated issues related to making plugins work without modifying the vB code, plus we've made extensive modifications to the templates. We've thought about upgrading to 4.2 but I'm afraid we'll have a lot of issues. We'll probably move directly to 5 or develop a custom solution that fits more what we're trying to do.

[WEBDosser]

A link to your forum might help.

[Dave]

I would optimize/repair your database like RichieBoy said and I would also clear the cache in vBulletin. (AdminCP > Maintenance > Clear System Cache).

[kh99]

It sounds like you might have lost the info in the datastore table, which is like a cache as you probably know. Maybe repairing it will bring it back, I don't know. But when you do something like disable then enable a product, it rebuilds the stuff stored in the datastore, which is probably why it started working again. I don't think there's any one master way of recreating everything in the datastore, but you might be able to force things to rebuild by making some configuration change and saving it (then change it back after if you want). That might be the way to fix vba page.

I don't know how that explains the attachment problem, but maybe it has to do with forum permissions, so try going to the forum manager and changing a forum setting.