A lesson to be learned at my expense

[Dave]

I just told a bunch of people about an update to info-tran.com. I had to clean some porno from the forum, a first. Everything is fine. Then this morning, I decided I wanted to move the location of the forum. I guess I was bored, or something. Anyway, I messed it up. If you tried to access the forum between 6am and just before noon today, you got a variety of error messages.

The lesson learned isn't about any of the mistakes I made, I'll make those again. It was about having a backup of the MySQL database. I had nothing to loose, because there is little content to loose, so it was easy. It would be different if I had paying customers. Google searches showed I wasn't the one one, but fixes led to more things wrong. Waste of time. Let's clean up and start over.

Easier said than done. Additional Google searches point to hidden files... After numerious installs, removals and reinstalls, the key was to get Fantastico to sucessfully uninstall. Then I manually cleaned out everything else, including the base, 'forum' folder, and deleted all the extra MySQL databases that had been created. My goal was not to fix, but to clean up and throw away.

So now when I create a new forum, everything checks out like nothing had ever been installed. The database number is the same as my backup (smf1). Now I do a restore, and everything is like it was before I wrecked it. Including some cosmetic changes I had just made. Sweet!

  Dave's Axiom #1, Everything belongs in the database

  Dave's Axiom #2, Keep the data apart from the application