Plaidophile

You know, it's hard to know there's a problem with something when people don't report that the problem exists. (Apparently something got botched when I last upgraded phpBB, causing registrations to fail. Which is why nobody has registered in months. Joy.)

Update: FUCK SHIT ASS TITS CUNT MOTHERFUCKER COCK MEKROB Golly, something still seems to be amiss. Anyone know how to get postgres to list and possibly drop all tables matching a certain pattern? I think a total from-scratch reinstall is in order. (Don't worry, I backed up all the comments first.)

Update: Fuck it. Just fucking fuck it. All prior comments are lost, and there's nothing I can do about it, thanks to phpBB's fragile database schema and totally opaque configuration, relying on SQL to configure things which really shouldn't be configured in SQL.

I think I'll try Ikonboard. Tomorrow.

Anyway, it wasn't anything a clean reinstall of phpBB couldn't fix. Of course, reinstalling phpBB ended up being much more difficult than I expected, since the upgrade stuff overwrote my existing config before it told me, 'Oh yeah, back up your config.php,' and then proceeded to lot let me emit a new one because the forum tables already existed, like, NO SHIT, so I had to manually step through the installer to find where it emitted config.php and how, exactly, it mangled the configuration information I provided into non-namespaced global variables (which are, of course, stored in plaintext, even my fucking DATABASE PASSWORD). I love Free software sometimes. This isn't one of them.

At least the newest version of phpBB already supports HTML entities out of the "box," so I don't have to go through all the crap of patching it to support entities. And it only had ONE bug in it! (Which I was able to fix easily.)

Now if only PHP weren't so insistent on using mod_php (and not knowing how to ignore hashbangs), or if only my webhost's admin felt like reenabling mod_php rather than making PHP files go through the CGI handler. God I hate Apache and PHP. is it really so hard to say, 'Hey, .php files should be preprocessed through /usr/local/bin/php!' instead of forcing this stupid convoluted 'module' mechanism which basically does just that, only crappier and less-configurably?