FYI Technical Site News (for those interested)

[xfadmin]

We will be performing a XenForo forum software upgrade, from 2.3.7 to 2.3.8, later today at 5:00 PM EST.

The forum will be suspended for approximately 15-20 minutes during this time, mainly to perform a "snapshot" backup and then the software update.

The update was successful.

However, it took quite a bit longer than necessary, because the snapshot backup, which usually takes 5-7 minutes, ran 90 minutes and STILL didn't complete. We finally just proceeded with the upgrade.

All's well; carry on.

 

[gerryvz]

I instituted several more software upgrades over the past hour -- including to the final version of XenForo 2.3.8 (the previous version that @xfadmin did recently was a "preview" version), as well as upgrades to the Enhanced Search capability, and the Media Gallery.

I also had to solve a slight, but common problem that stemmed from the recent Ubuntu operating system upgrade. That problem was a permissions issue that was not allowing easy software upgrades from within the XenForo control panel. Fortunately with a few geeky commands relating to permissions and directory ownership, and some testing, I was able to resolve the issue and all is well in the XenForo admin world again.

No forum downtime for any of this, just all done in the background.

Of interest to folks, the new update 2.3.8 will provide higher resolution "thumbnail" images for photos and attachments, which will be especially welcome for folks on mobile devices. This will apply to all new attachments going forward.

For the 300,000 existing attachments and photos, I am currently in the process of rebuilding the attachment thumbnails to higher resolutions. This is a process that is likely going to take 6-8 hours, but it will run on the server in the background and will not affect forum operations at all. Hopefully when things are done, folks will begin to notice some changes. Maybe not, though.

XenForo has been promising version 2.4 now for more than 18 months, and the natives are beyond restless. They vastly overpromised and have under-delivered on this. They are still saying it is coming in the not-too-distant future, but are declining to give any time frame. Maybe in 2026?!? We'll see.

In the meantime they threw this 2.3.8 bone to appease folks. 2.4 is going to be a pretty significant upgrade, though.

When we started this forum on XenForo in March 2019, they had just released 2.1.0 a few weeks prior. So literally in 6+ years, they have only issued two "major" releases of XenForo and lots of incremental "point" releases, of which this latest 2.3.8 is. Typically these tend to be bug-fix updates, with an occasional new feature or two thrown in (such as the higher-res thumbnails).

 

[gerryvz]

This morning we did a switchover of our php language from version 8.3.30 to 8.4.17.




php is the language that much of the XenForo forum software code uses. Version 8.3 was first released at the end of November, 2023, and active support of 8.3 ended in November, 2025. Security patch support does extend through December 31, 2027.

Version 8.4 was released in November, 2024, and is actively supported through November 2026, with security patches extending through December 31, 2028. It is the current "sweet spot" for XenForo installations. The current version of php 8.4 is 8.4.18, which was released on February 12th (last week). However, @xfadmin won't upgrade from 8.4.17 (released January 15th, 2026) likely until the end of this week, or the weekend.

php 8.5 was released in November 2025, and is currently on 8.5.3 (released last week, also 12-Feb). We won't "upgrade" to 8.5 until likely about a year from now, because many of the XenForo add-ons that we use to provide additional functionality to the site, aren't (yet) tested and compatible with php 8.5.
This is all part of the ongoing back-end maintenance and updates that happen with the site several times a week, to keep things running smoothly, and future-proofed. Using php 8.4 will put us in a very good technical position for upcoming upgrades to the XenForo software -- which they keep promising will be a big upgrade in the "near future" to version 2.4. Of course, they've been saying this for more than 1.5 years now.....

 

[gerryvz]

The current version of php 8.4 is 8.4.18, which was released on February 12th (last week). However, @xfadmin won't upgrade from 8.4.17 (released January 15th, 2026) likely until the end of this week, or the weekend.

Looks like @xfadmin was indeed busy.....