[Forum] Sudden problem with albums

[Kat]

As I was preparing to upgrade my forums from 4.07 to 4.2.3, I noticed there was a problem with my albums. I went ahead and upgrading my test forums and it did not fix the problem, so it isn't that I have not upgraded yet.

If someone posts a new image to their album, their cover photo turns to an X and has an attachment id of zero. And then if you click into their albums, all of their photos are there, but they only show as the name of the picture without the actual picture showing. in other words, just a list of the photo titles. And on one of the albums, they have a combination of a few Xs, the images that should be there plus some that are just the name of the image.

I typically store my images in the database. But when this first happened we lost several images so I did a restore of the database from backup to get the images back. When the problem started happening again (immediately) I closed the albums and I moved them all to the file system so that I would not lose any posts or images again. The result is the same whether they are in the filesystem or database.

I really want to get my forums upgraded but more importantly at the moment, I need to figure out what is going wrong with these images and get my albums opened again. I would very much appreciate some help solving this.

I have added two attachments. The first one is a new album and just has the list of names of the images. Then second one is an older album where the new images are just the names of the images but also has some Xs with missing pictures.

[Kat]

Maybe even some hints as to where or what to look at?

[Mark.B]

This doesn't happen on a default installation. Please try the following:

1. To disable the plugin/hook system completely, edit includes/config.php and add the following code:
Just below

<?php

enter

define('DISABLE_HOOKS', true);

2. Now go to AdminCP > Style Manager
and create a new style with no parent.
Now browse your forum using this new style.

Do you still have the same problem?

[Kat]

So, I did all of that. Now it is even worse, ALL of the albums are showing with Xs. (sample attached)

[Mark.B]

What version of php are you running on the server?

[Kat]

I was running 5.3. something until I went to upgrade when this started and I had to up to 5.4 for the upgrade.

[Kat]

I don't know where to go from here....................

Besides needing my albums in working order, I really need to upgrade my live forums and I am just afraid to do that before I figure out what this problem is.

[Kat]

In the hopes of saving someone else the $$$ that I had to spend to fix this: it turns out I had a corrupt config file.

[Paul M]

Huh?

Corrupt how exactly? What presisely was the problem?

If something was wrong with your config file, I would expect the whole site to fail.

[Kat]

It got a BOM added, apparently while using the code editor on my cPanel. I usually use Notepad++ to avoid that but for some reason that I do not 100% recall now (couldn't access FTP, I think) I ended up editing it through cPanel, which I have done before with no problems, but it messed it up this time.

And I have had that happen in the distant pass, before I learned to use something besides Notepad and while it caused problems, the site still worked. So to say that if something was wrong with the config file the whole site would fail is just not true.

[Paul M]

I said I would expect it to fail, not that it would [always] fail.

A BOM is not exactly something wrong, or corruption, just a formatting issue (and btw, depending on other settings, it can still take a site down).