Resurrection...

[lucas]

Hello all,

Most of you don’t know me, but I’m a longtime personal friend of Smithers. I know this forum means a lot to him, and I know it has meant a lot to many of you over the years.

As you probably noticed, the forum had fallen into disrepair. Here's an actual book I wrote after looking at the code base:

its-effed.png (741.45 KiB) Viewed 91 times

The good news is that the forum is back.

I’ve spent the last several days cleaning things up, removing old compromised code, and migrating the forum from the legacy vBulletin setup to a current phpBB installation. The new forum software is more secure, easier to maintain, and should give this community a much better foundation going forward.

A couple notes as everyone gets settled back in:

If you already had an account, try logging in as usual. Some passwords may not have carried over cleanly during the migration, so you may need to use the password reset option. If password reset does not work for you, email [email protected] and we’ll help get your account sorted manually.

Smithers will also be spending some time learning the new admin tools, adjusting the look and feel, and getting comfortable with the backend. There may be a few small tweaks along the way, but the important part is that the forum is alive again and in a much better place technically.

Glad to see this place back online. Hope everyone is doing well.

See you on the road.

[lucas]

Here's a post mortem on what I had to do to bring her back from the shadow realm. The old forum was running on vBulletin 3.7.4, which dates back to the late 2008. That software served the community for a very long time, but it was far past its safe operating life. Over time, the old install became vulnerable to spam, exploits, and compromised files. Eventually, the forum was no longer in a stable or secure state.

The goal was to preserve as much of the old community content as possible while moving the forum onto current software that can be maintained going forward.

Here is the broad rundown of what was done:

• Confirmed the original forum was running on vBulletin 3.7.4.
• Took initial backups of the old vBulletin database and forum files before attempting migration work.
• Identified that the old vBulletin codebase contained compromised and suspicious files, including random PHP files and malicious-looking folders inside old upload/avatar-related directories.
• Quarantined suspicious legacy files and avoided restoring old executable vBulletin code into the live web path.
• Set up a separate migration/staging environment at migrate.fourwheelforum.com so the new forum could be built and tested without disrupting the live site further.
• Installed phpBB as the replacement forum software.
• Imported the vBulletin database content into phpBB using migration/conversion tooling.
• Worked through migration issues related to forum/category structure, permissions, counts, and converted post formatting.
• Resolved duplicated or broken permission mappings from the import.
• Rebuilt forum permissions so public forums were visible again to guests, registered users, and administrators.
• Confirmed administrator groups and forum roles were correctly present in the phpBB database.
• Fixed an issue where administrators could log in but still could not see forums due to missing forum-level permissions.
• Re-synced forum post and topic counts after the import.
• Rebuilt the “last post” data for each forum, since the imported forums had post/topic counts but blank last-post fields.
• Added fallback logic so forums with blank last-post subjects could use the topic title instead.
• Upgraded phpBB from the initially migrated 3.1-era state to phpBB 3.3.16, the current secure branch used for the final live forum.
• Confirmed the upgraded database version as 3.3.16.
• Resolved PHP compatibility issues during the upgrade.
• Identified that the server had multiple PHP versions installed, including PHP 5.4, 7.2, 7.4, and 8.0.
• Switched the forum to PHP 7.4, which was compatible with phpBB 3.3.16 on this server.
• Fixed missing PHP extension issues encountered during the database migration/update process.
• Ran the phpBB database migration/update process successfully.
• Disabled and removed the active phpBB install directory after upgrade so the board could safely run.
• Fixed file ownership and permissions for the phpBB cache, files, store, and avatar upload directories.
• Cleared phpBB cache multiple times during troubleshooting and after database/style changes.
• Confirmed the upgraded forum was running under the correct PHP handler.
• Moved the finished phpBB forum from the migration subdomain into the real live forum web root.
• Updated phpBB’s live domain settings, including server name, cookie domain, script path, HTTPS protocol, secure cookies, and server port.
• Preserved the old root website files that were still needed for the related legacy Four Wheel Performance site.
• Avoided restoring the old compromised vBulletin forum code into the live phpBB directory.
• Archived the old vBulletin/root files into a compressed backup tarball.
• Removed loose unpacked compromised legacy files from the server after archiving.
• Checked the live phpBB directory for random or suspicious PHP files.
• Confirmed the live phpBB root only contained expected phpBB files such as index.php, viewtopic.php, viewforum.php, posting.php, ucp.php, mcp.php, etc.
• Checked for old vBulletin, backup, or forum-backup folders remaining under the public web path.
• Found and moved the disabled phpBB installer directory out of the live forum path for extra hardening.
• Confirmed avatars were enabled in phpBB, but determined that no user avatar metadata had migrated, so existing users did not have avatars assigned.
• Inspected old vBulletin avatar folders and found suspicious compromise artifacts, so those old avatar folders were intentionally not restored.
• Cleaned up the birthday block on the forum index by disabling the separate “load birthdays” setting.
• Updated layout and styling to make phpBB feel more like the old vBulletin forum.
• Widened the forum layout so it uses more of the browser window.
• Added the legacy-style top banner image back to the forum.
• Adjusted the banner so it repeats horizontally across the top row instead of appearing only inside the phpBB header.
• Hid the default phpBB logo from the header.
• Added custom CSS to move the design closer to the old forum look and feel, including darker blues, gray backgrounds, older-style forum rows, and more readable spacing.
• Fixed the old migrated YouTube BBCode.
• The old YouTube BBCode was still using a vBulletin-era warning box and Flash embed code.
• Replaced the old YouTube BBCode template with a modern iframe embed using youtube-nocookie.com.
• Added responsive styling for YouTube embeds.
• Confirmed migrated YouTube embeds now display properly.
• Reviewed all custom BBCodes and found only a small set: font, align, indent, sigpic, and youtube.
• Confirmed the old sigpic BBCode was unused, so it was left alone.
• Found that hundreds of migrated quote blocks had malformed vBulletin-style quote syntax
• Normalized malformed quote tags.
• Discovered that some migrated posts were stored in phpBB’s parsed text format, which meant simple BBCode reparsing was not enough.
• Converted broken quote markup into phpBB’s proper parsed quote format.
• Confirmed quote rendering was fixed in spot checks.
• Rebuilt the active phpBB search index so forum search works properly again.

The end result:

The forum is now running on current phpBB instead of the old vBulletin 3.7.4 install. The old forum content has been preserved, the live codebase is much cleaner, and the board is in a much better position to stay online and maintainable going forward.

There may still be a few cosmetic or formatting issues from the old migration. That is expected with a forum this old and with so many years of posts. But the major pieces are now working: the forum loads, users and posts are present, categories are visible, search is being rebuilt, YouTube embeds work, quotes are being cleaned up, and the old compromised vBulletin code is no longer the live forum software.