2024-02-22 Major Fail when Upgrading the Wiki

[Deantwo]

Could you maybe rename this thread to something less vague?
I fear what people's reaction would be to an update thread titled "2024-02-22 Major Fuck Up". Maybe just rename it to "2024-02-22 Wiki Data Loss" or something.

[Haxus]

If you want files of data just ask.

Renamed. Still feel like punishing myself.

[Celarious]

I got the same error. Push the skip button and you will login with your old password.

Unfortunately it seemed my old password no longer worked, so I reset it and and got a temporary one

That temp password works, but because it's a temporary, it forces me to change it in order to login, and I can't change it due to the error

Googled the db error and apparently you need to run a script called Update.php, apparently not doing that can cause the error

[Haxus]

Thank you. I was going to research the problem in the morning. I will check out that update script.

[Celarious]

For reference, the mediawiki manual (here and here) mentions it's a mandatory step of upgrades:

You should run update.php after each upgrade of MediaWiki or after the update or install of an extension that requires a schema update.

Also mentions that there's also a GUI-based web updater you can use directly from the wiki, if you find it easier: https://hazeron.com/mediawiki-1.41.0/mw-.../index.php

[Haxus]

The gui based updater is the one I ran at each step/version along the way. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it destroyed the database, requiring an intermediate version to progress through the updates. It was a slow process.

So having already run the upgrade I will have to find another solution.

[Haxus]

I ran the update.php script. It ran without errors. It did not solve the problem. I'll keep looking for an answer.

[Haxus]

Wiki is working properly now. User passwords can be changed without a database error.

A table 'bot_passwords' was missing from the database. Through all their updating they never managed to create it in my old data. I think that table did not exist in the old version we were using.

[Haxus]

Nightly backups of the wiki and forum databases did their work last night.

I forgot to set those up after the server change two years ago. This contributed to my failure yesterday. I thought they were working but alas.

The coup de grace was that the backup I did just before the upgrade was no good for a stupid reason I will not elaborate.

[Haxus]

On to the forum upgrade. There are plenty of backups of that database to avoid a repeat of yesterday.