Blog and Forum Was Down For A Bit - Thu, 23 Jul 2015

I noticed a problem in the Behold Forum last night where a post was not always showing up. Last night I attempted to fix it with somewhat disastrous results.

Unbeknownst to me, I crashed both the Forum and Blog last night at 11:45 p.m. and it took me a few hours today to bring them back up today.

I still don’t know exactly what happened, but I’m going to do some investigation and will attempt to ensure everything is working.

So, hopefully not, but there may be a few short periods of disruption with the blog and forum over the next couple of days.

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Update 8 hours later:  I’ve cleaned everything up and the Blog and Forum should both be running nicely now.

Bonus: I found and fixed a problem where searches for exact strings with double quotes will now paginate properly. This had been bugging me for years and I finally found what it was and fixed it. PHP evaluates the string within double quotes, and when the search term is a double quoted string, PHP eats it up. The fix was to enclose the query string with an htmlspecialchars function to prevent the evaluation. GenSoftReviews searches had the same problem, and I’ve fixed it there as well.

PHP “evaluates” doubly quoted strings. It doesn’t evaluate single quoted strings. Another unexpected inconsistent feature. This is yet another example of why PHP is the world’s worst programming language.