A quick update about this website
Further update following the removal of support for legacy versions of PHP.
What happened?
Our hosting company has disabled support for the version of PHP that this website was originally written in.
This followed broader developments around the end of support for older PHP versions. You can read more about the wider context in this BBC News report.
A Progress Report:
DBF was a portal written in PHP and backed by a SMF forum. Several of the forum templates had been changed for specific features of the portal, plus the forum had a number of third-party plugins installed which complicated the update process.
The forum has now been updated to the latest version of SMF, also I have enabled the latest version of PHP from our hosting provider. The site loads and renders properly but it needs testing.
It is unlikely that the front page and shoutbox will come back in thier previous form, I will eventually create something new. I will incorporate the banner which Benny wrote for us.
I have seen a few charset conversion artifacts on some of the posts and a few of the plugins like the karma plugin are gone but there are no show stoppers so far and I expect to bring this site back to operation within the next few weeks. I will see if there is a safe way to re-enable registrations for new users too without getting wrecked by bots.
The data is safe
Please be assured that all the site's data is safe. Nothing has been lost. The forum is actually working now; there are just a few more weeks of work to do.