A scheduled forum upgrade, and a thumbnail that came out sideways

A version upgrade booked for a fixed hour, so the members could be told when the board would be down, followed by two image problems that both turned out to be somewhere other than phpBB.

The objective

The client wanted the upgrade done at an agreed time rather than whenever it suited me, because the board goes offline during it and the members needed warning.

Two image problems were open at the same time. Uploads from one member stalled and never finished, and thumbnails of certain photos came out rotated while the full-size version was the right way up.

What I did

I agreed a time slot, prepared the upgrade in advance, and took the board offline only for the window itself. When something came up on the day, I moved the slot rather than starting late and running past it.

For the stalled uploads, I went through the server error logs, found nothing, said so, and suggested turning the CDN off temporarily as a test. That's where it turned out to be.

For the rotated thumbnails, I found the photo is stored rotated and carries its correct orientation in its EXIF data. The image library phpBB uses ignores EXIF when it generates a thumbnail, so the thumbnail comes out the way the file is stored. I confirmed it by reproducing the same result on older phpBB versions.

The result

The board went to the current version inside the agreed window. Neither image problem was phpBB, and both were identified rather than worked around by guesswork.