Rant about Forum (software)

Grrrr. Forum software. Grrrr.
I purchased Invision Power Discussion Board software from SmartyHost who also host my website and manage some of my domain names. Nowadays forum software is like website management or email admin – it should all be done through a control panel.

Well. I wanted to change the forum’s name from the generic Invision Boards to World Communities. A pretty basic request huh? But I get :

Warning: fopen(./conf_global.php): failed to open stream: Permission denied in
blahblah/Admin/admin_functions.php on line 380 Fatal Error: Could not open conf_global for writing – no changes applied.
Try changing the CHMOD to 0777

When I logged a ticket – after all, Smartyhost sold me the package and installed it for me – the reply was:

This is a scripting issue, if something does not work, you will need to check it with the code, if you want to change something within it then we do not provide any support for it.

Not good enough. Ah well, I went to the admin_functions file and the Admin folder and changed the permissions to write (thats sorta what CHMOD to 0777 means) but it didnt’ work.
I’ve relogged a trouble ticket (they closed the old one -grrrr) so we’ll see. What I expect (and hope) is a response more like this one on another ISP’s support forums.

And re: the config file being locked, I fixed the file’s owership so can access
it, it should all be fine now. 😀 Cheers, Ronnie

Ronnie is the admin at Always Web Hosting and checks into the AWH forums from time to time. I really like the idea of an ISP hosting their own community. Amin at SmartyHost would not have to answer dumb questions from users like me all the time – I could post in the forums and geeks that live and breathe to tweak theirs (and everyone else’s) websites could tell me which file to change permissions on. Win – Win.

Problem is, I’m not an expert on this stuff (nor want to be). So, while I wait for Smartyhost to figure out that they didn’t configure it correctly on installation, I’m off to do a Basic PHP & MySQL Enhanced course on Saturday at USYD CCE – I’ll be sure to let you know how it went.

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