MyBB Community Forums

Hello!

Sorry to bring all this terrible stuff down, but I'm really not sure why it happened, and i'm interested in knowing how I can avoid it happening again.

I recently converted my forum from SMF. I don't think that has anything to do with these bugs, but I guess it might be relevant.

The problem

Yesterday everything was fine. Today, I got up and found some rather strange things going on.
The first thing I noticed was that no usernames were displayed on the highscores section of my game arcade plugin. That was strange. I was going to ask the arcade guys about it, but then I noticed that *all* my plugins were listed as not-activated (they all had an activate link).

I activated the ones I use again, but obviously they weren't simply deactivated the normal way, because at least one threw up an SQL error (a plugin problem, not myBB - obviously not designed to deal with existing tables), and the advert plugin ended up inserting a second advert box next to the first. I managed to fix that by uninstalling it and then reactivating it, which cleared both boxes and brought back one.

So obviously this is not (or at least not completely) the fault of a plugin. It's affecting all equally. As the day has gone on, I've noticed more strange things:

The permissions were strange. Normal members were suddenly able to reply to threads in my moderator-only forum. The permissions looked good, but for some reason they weren't acting. I saved the permissions the way they were meant to be, and that seemed to fix the problem - despite not doing anything. The strange thing about this is that even if the permissions had been altered by someone else in the database, one would assume that the forum software would reflect the alterations when I browsed the permissions. If that's not the case (does the admin interface read the permissions from a flat file while the main forum reads from the database?) then that would get me closer to the answer.

The smileys aren't displaying. The box on the left has disapeared, as has the post-icon box. This has happened in every template installed, including the default one.

That's what I've seen for now. Does anyone have any thoughts. This seems like somewhat more than a random error. I've had someone hack into my website in the past (when I was running SMF), and although I'm pretty sure they have no way of accessing files or the database any more, I could be wrong. Could what I'm describing be done by someone playing around in the database? Perhaps the permissions (assuming the admin interface reads off a flat file, while the forum software reads off the database, which seems kind of strange), but I can't see how the smiley box could be affected by someone changing settings in phpMyAdmin.

Edit: In both the database and the settings.php file, the settings to allow the smiley box are set to 1.

All of these problems could be caused by something very minor.

Smilies - ACP > Configuration > Clickable Smilies and BB Code > Clickable Smilies Inserter > ON. Maybe turn it off and then on again, and make sure ./inc/settings.php is CHMOD to 666. Also make sure the templates are default.
Permissions - go to ACP > Forums & Posts > **choose forum** > Options > Permissions > **choose group** > Edit Permissions/Set Permissions > make sue it's ok here and choose 'Use custom permissions below' if you change anything here.
Plugins - Are you sure they were written for 1.4.4??

OK, I have done that, and the problem persists.
I think it's deeper than just settings. Smilies aren't displaying at all - even when typed manually, and instead the

:D

is displayed. The "Don't display smilies" isn't checked when making posts.

What could it be? Could the forum have globally decided not to display smilies? Image embedding works, so it's not related to that.

I don't think everything is unrelated. A lot of stuff seems to have happened last night and it's really not clear why. I can't see how it could have done it without prompting, but I also can't see what would prompt the forum to do this kind of stuff. It's not the kind of thing someone would do malicously.

Firstly, it would be best to try and revert to a backup of your forum. Even if you lose a day's posts, at least you have it fully working again.

Your smilies and post icons problem might be to do with templates. Not sure why, but it sounds the most probable if the settings say allow them. Check the templates, and if possible, revert them back to the default.

MyBB does not use flat-files, it reads everything from the database or cache. In ACP => Tools & Maintenance => Cache Manager, there is a forumpermission cache, it could be worth rebuilding it to see if this effects it, as a deactivated plugin might not have done it. Create yourself a normal user account, and test the permissions yourself.

Either way, things don't just happen on spur of the moment, this has to be activated by someone. Check the server logs to see what time/date this happened, and (in most cases) grab the IP address of the action, and check it against members of the forum. There is also the administrator logs to see if they have deactivated via MyBB.

I fixed the smilies by mass edit > Save, and the post icons seemed to come back after I edited one and saved it. The user titles, which had also disapeared, came back after I edited and saved each one (not changing anything).

It's still not clear what caused this. I will have a look at the server logs when I have more time, but it seems that something caused all the plugins to be (or appear to be) disabled. How bizarre.

Sounds like a database issue, maybe corrupt? Try repairing the database tables if you can (phpMyAdmin or cPanel makes it easy, but I'm not sure what your options are).

(2009-01-09, 10:20 AM)KuJoe Wrote: [ -> ]Sounds like a database issue, maybe corrupt? Try repairing the database tables if you can (phpMyAdmin or cPanel makes it easy, but I'm not sure what your options are).

If it was, mySQL should return an error - but there's no harm in repairing them

Maybe talk to your host and see if things were changed on their end.

(2009-01-09, 10:09 AM)leoedin Wrote: [ -> ]I fixed the smilies by mass edit > Save, and the post icons seemed to come back after I edited one and saved it. The user titles, which had also disapeared, came back after I edited and saved each one (not changing anything).

It's still not clear what caused this. I will have a look at the server logs when I have more time, but it seems that something caused all the plugins to be (or appear to be) disabled. How bizarre.

This happens when you change your file caching from "database" to another caching technology without rebuilding all your caches. I have made doing this easier in MyBB 1.6.

Thanks! I didn't change it myself, although it's possible another admin did. Unlikely though.