Upgrade from vBulletin 4.2.2 to vBulletin 5.x scrambles RSS feeds

[jdj]

We just noticed something on our site that had escaped our attention after our upgrade. With vB4.x we had a separate admin user set up to publish all the RSS feeds: So in RSS feed manager the feeds were set up to post to different forums, but the 'user' posting was always this feed manager.

Post upgrade I noticed that one of the other admins was posting frequently on one of the forums that we don't often use, but wasn't bothered about it....we just let the other admins do their job.

Today I asked why she was posting and found out that she wasn't. Having investigated I noticed that what was happening was the RSS Feed manager was posting as the wrong admin. I went back to the RSS feeds and they were all configured to post from the right admin user, but the upgrade script had apparently randomly allocated the posts to a variety of different forums.

There was no logical reason why this particular admin id should have been chosen. It wasn't the 'next in line' admin, the permissions weren't different. After I'd gone back and edited all the forums that the feeds were supposed to be going to the problem stopped happening, even though I didn't edit the RSS feed admin user in the RSS feeds manager at all.

So there is a bug here somewhere that can make a mess of things with your RSS feed manager. Whether it will ever be fixed I don't know but I'm posting here to let anybody who is considering upgrading from 4.2.2 to 5.x to check their RSS feed manager immediately post upgrade.

[Wayne Luke]

Haven't encountered this before. You'll need to document this here: http://tracker.vbulletin.com/secure/...91&issuetype=1

Providing examples of the feeds and their settings may help. A copy of your pre-upgrade database may be requested.

[jdj]

I cannot provide you with a copy of my pre-upgrade database: I do have one but European personal data protection rules mean that I cannot just give you a copy of my database. If anybody from vBulletin wants to solve the problem and look at it I can arrange that as long as the database remains on my server.

I think I may have provided examples of the feeds in the support ticket I originally put in.

[jdj]

I created it as this issue

http://tracker.vbulletin.com/browse/VBV-13948

As stated previously, I have a backup of my pre-upgrade database but I cannot give it to you. If someone wants to look at it they'll need to look at it on our server without downloading anything.

[jdj]

Just noticed that although the original problem has gone since I reallocated the feeds back to the forums they were supposed to be going to there is another anomaly: Everything now seems to be working again although when the user ID that posts the RSS feeds posts I get the following as a notification message.....

"Guest has just posted in the [name of forum] forum of [mysite] Community under the title [title of thread]

This thread is located at http://mysite.com/node/31412

Here is the message that has just been posted:"

....followed by the copy of the post.

We don't have a user id called "Guest" and when I click back through to the post itself it now correctly displays the user id that's set up to post the RSS feeds.

So there's still something odd about the RSS Feeds in vB5 because it doesn't recognise the user id that's doing the posting.

[jdj]

I just got a notification from our forum that one of the other named users had posted to the forum (someone other than 'Guest') but it looked like something posted by the RSS feeds manager. I went back to the site and checked and sure enough the post came from RSS feeds but the notification gave the wrong name. I've checked the RSS Feed Manager and the settings are all correct, so it's a bug in the vB5 RSS feed manager somewhere.

PS: I just posted a copy of the post and the email notification that came from it in the sensitive area of the support ticket that I opened when I first saw problems with the vB5 RSS feed.

[Wayne Luke]

We still need to see the original data so we can recreate this issue.

[jdj]

We still need to see the original data so we can recreate this issue.

We have a support ticket for this ongoing. If anybody from vB support wants to look at the database on our server I can arrange that as long as they commit not to download the database to anywhere outside the United Kingdom, as per our local personal data protection rules.

[Wayne Luke]

We don't currently have any developers working on vBulletin 5 in the UK. They would need a copy of the pre-upgrade Database in order to replicate the problem so a fix can be created. Without recreating the original problem first and not being able to recreate it on fresh installations or other upgrades, we're kind of stuck.

I would suggest the workaround of deleting all feeds and then recreating them from scratch with the proper settings.

[jdj]

I haven't said that they can't recreate it on fresh installations: They'd just have to do it on our server if they wanted to investigate the problem. As long as the data remain secure and in the UK there isn't a problem.