Running VBulletion Test on webserver

[catastrope]

Hi,

Please some one guide me,

I have hosted my website on a webserver with
PHP 4.3.11
MySQL Client 4.0.16

This meets the 'minimum requirement' conditions set by VBulletin, but not the recommended versions.

So I ran the VB Test PHP script on my webserver all things 'passed' but for
magic_quotes_gpcFail (http://hook2book.com/vb_test.php?help=magic_quotes_gpc)


and it says,
Overall Result:Pass

But the last line is,
Your vBulletin installation may have reduced functionality, click the link(s) above for more information

And when I click on 'Fail' this is what it has to say,

magic_quotes_gpc should be off for optimal performance, ask your host to change this in php.ini

Now I really dont know what it means!
and I am not sure as to the web host provider will do this for me!!

What do I do now?
Should I be investing my money now on VBulletin?
I badly want to use VBulletin and not in a position to switch webhost(signed just yesterday!)

If I go ahead and deploy VBulletin on my webserver, will I lack some functionalities, If so what are they.

Thanks in advance

[feldon23]

I am not sure why magic_quotes_gpc is even tested. It has to do whether variables collected from certain places are 'escaped' or protected.

It really has no meaning to vBulletin whatsoever since vBulletin does its own processing of these outside variables. This does NOT affect performance in any measurable way.

If everything else passed, you're good to go.

[catastrope]

Thanks a lot for your quick reply!
That was really helpful...

Yup, all other test result says Pass..
so may I can make the move now...

[Scott MacVicar]

I am not sure why magic_quotes_gpc is even tested. It has to do whether variables collected from certain places are 'escaped' or protected.

It really has no meaning to vBulletin whatsoever since vBulletin does its own processing of these outside variables. This does NOT affect performance in any measurable way.

If everything else passed, you're good to go.
It affects performance as we need to recursively strip slashes from all of the super global arrays, its not a noticeable performance issue on most page loads but it is on newreply if your sending large amounts of text.

[catastrope]

Thanks for your kind replies

Luckily I got it switched off on my webserver!!:)

So the test result now says,
vBulletin should run on your system without any errors

But I was just wondering what will be the difference between running vbulletin on 'minimum required PHP and MySQL version' and the recommended version?
Can someone elaborate on this?(May be in layman's terms)

[Colin F]

Very generally, newer versions usually have less bugs, more features, and are optimized further.

[catastrope]

I was not referring to the versions of VBulletin.

Instead I was referring to running *latest* version of VBulletin on

PHP 4.3.11
MySQL Client 4.0.16

[set as 'minimum req']

Vis-a-vis running on

PHP 4.4.2 or 5.1.2 or later
MySQL 5.0.19 or later

[stated as 'recommended version']

[Colin F]

The same applies.
Newer versions (recommended) of PHP and MySQL should generally be more optimized than older versions (minimum).

[catastrope]

Thanks!
So I can safely presume that none of the *functionality* will be affected when run on minimum supported version?
Only performance issues are seen right..

[Colin F]

That's correct, no vBulletin functionality should be affected.