Short Guide To A Successful Upgrade of Phpfox

Recently we have heard of a series of failed upgrades from versions 3.0.x to 3.1.0. One thing they all had in common was a human factor, "level 8" in the OSI model as we used to joke back in college.

The upgrade routine is pretty straightforward, you can read the official guide here, but still it seems people have some problems, so here it is to make your life a little bit easier.

1. If you are upgrading your live site before upgrading your development site, stop and change gears to upgrading your development site. Only when the upgrade has satisfied you in the development site do you upgrade your live site.
2. If you do not have a development site set up one.
3. Make a full backup of your site, this may be 'painful' in terms of server load and in 99.99% of the cases not needed, but if you are the lucky one you will regret not having one.
4. Enable debug mode, if anything goes wrong it will show you very important information.
5. Only upload recently downloaded files from the account area. In this way you are making sure that you have the most up to date files, and that these have no modifications.
6. Read everything that the script shows you. Even if you have upgraded thousands of sites, read and assume you do not know by heart what the upgrade says. 
7. A red warning is worth attention. If you have a working site and you replace the file /include/setting/server.sett.php with an invalid one the upgrade routine will think you are installing fresh and offer you to drop (delete, remove, wipe, lose) the tables in your database. This means if you proceed you will lose your existing site, all the members, all the photos... everything. This warning looks like this, its really hard to miss!
   
   
   (It does not even have a "Next" step, it has a red button with a warning)
   
   
   
   
8. Sometimes when you upload files they may land with very limited privileges, if you have debug mode enabled you will see a warning but know what to do because debug mode was enabled. Work with your hosting company to ensure that all files and folders have the least permissions needed for the script to work

Last: If you post a comment here asking for support you will be disappointed. While I might be in a good mood your best option is to go to the forums and look for help there, but look for posts already existing, your problem is most likely already solved in an existing thread.