MyBB Community Forums

Hello and good morning! First post for me on the MyBB Community!

This week I received an email from the hosting provider that they soon stop supporting php 5.6 and migrate to php 8.1. My webforum is running since more than 10 years on php 5.6 and MyBB 1.6.18 so I have to upgrade to MyBB 1.8.x first and then change php version 8.1.

I made an upgrade to version 1.8.0, the install directory was removed, but the forum gives the following fault report which is attached as text and screenshot.

74a'
MyBB has experienced an internal SQL error and cannot continue.
SQL Error:
1300 - Invalid utf8 character string: '812445'
Query:
SELECT * FROM mybb_sessions WHERE sid='68852a0388b2b9e406e6603e976c6d37' AND ip=X'2a10378124450001eaf087a52a09e74a'

What is the best way to solve this problem? I hope some people can give an idea on how to solve

More expert members will talk about database encoding - which might offer relief.  Know nothing regarding your database to comment.  Not expert anyway.

I'll just point out, mybb_sessions can be flushed, because it will repopulate.  Probably the least of your worries at this stage.   I'd prevent access via htaccess for example, flush mybb_sessions, try the upgrade again.