Ruining your forum accidently from the ACP?

Have you ever ruined anything on your forum by messing up on something in the ACP?

I remember back in the day when I was new to running forums, I had messed up this once where I was trying to move the contents of one forum from another but I had messed up somehow and deleted the forum without moving the posts, so I had lost a good amount of posts.

 

I do that all the time ._.
It's usually something to do with the cache too.... My board will throw a PHP error about a missing method in a cache file, and clearing the caches don't fix it. I'm pretty sure something is a little broken with my IPB installation, I'm hoping the upgrade to 3.2 will fix it.

 

You can try reuploading the files of a new package and it will overwrite, and add in any files you might be missing. Does sound like something is broken.

 

Can't say that I've ever done this before, but I sure have buggered the the files/database before without backups back in the day when I was a novice at installing mods, etc.

 

Oh haha, yea that is a problem with phpBB, always gotta backup your forum before installing a mod since its so complicated, I remember my first time on phpbb had the same problem.
Haven't had the problem on any other forum software as its not as bad as phpbb's mod system.

 

Yes. Specifically when I used phpbb. God what a headache that software was.
I always backup before doing any maintenance though.

 

Haha tell me about it, when I was referring to the problem I had it was a phpbb forum and I always made backups as well. Specially before installing mods.

 

I did it before when I was running IPB. I ended up deleting everything, and moving to vBulletin after. Stupid move on my part(the deleting)

 

Not yet but there is always a first time
but I am careful when in there

 

Delete what, the posts in a forum or something else?

 

Well, that answers my question as to whether or not I should use phpBB. My hosting company offers that particular free forum software auto-installed on the website space and I was wondering if it were any good. Seeing how many problems can be caused with installation, I might not even try it out.

As for myself, I have actually ruined my SMF installation 3 times by using an incompatible theme (template?) . For whatever reason, the image files were not included in the package or some other problem and never uploaded. It's hard to know those things ahead of time. Anyway, when I uploaded the theme, my entire forum disappeared and I was left with nothing.

I learned to keep a couple extra tabs open to the Themes page so I could switch back fast if a problem occurred. The first three times, I literally reinstalled a fresh copy of SMF and started over. I'm not saying it wasn't good practice. I could do it now with one eye closed and half asleep, which ironically is how I did it last time.

But, I would rather get the software installed and move onto more important things.

Yet another reason I use a Beta site to test out all my templates on SMF before installing on the main site.

 

I haven't done anything like that with my forums but I do get nervous about tampering with the Cpanel at times. It can get nerve-racking.

 

Once on my first forum, while I was using phpBB actually, I was looking around in the ACP. I wasn't exactly sure what "prune" meant. So I tried it out. And lost about 25% of the posts on my board. I was distraught. I was anything older than a certain date.

Thankfully everything moved ahead w/o any issues. But I was green. Knowing what I know now, a good host would be able to restore your database from the previous day. But I didn't know what I was doing.

A similar example was when I was moving to a different host. I left HOST A to go to HOST B. Better deal, better price, blah blah blah. Turned out it was too good to be true and that first weekend my new host craps out. Like totally. All was lost (seemingly). But thankfully I'd not deleted my account on my first host.

So I just had to point my nameservers back to my old host. Yeah, I lost about 5 or so days worth of posting and member registrations. But I had my previous 3 or 4 months still there at my old place. That experience made me REALLY research any new host I used.

 

phpBB is great but unfortunately it does have a complicated system (Mods, Styles, the whole ACP). If you are looking for something that is easy to use, and where its easy to install mods and themes, MyBB is definitely the way to go. I have never had any problems on it.

 

Oh wow, sorry to hear blake, I remember when I was new to phpBB I was a bit confused with the prune feature too as I had no idea what prune meant at the time, but luckily I didnt try to investigate like I usually do.

 

Yeah, it was a hard lesson learned, but one I never forgot!

 

Well we all learn from our mistakes