Phorum 3 – hostname too small

I’ve been using a customized version of Phorum for some time. It has served me well over the years, including an article feedback module I created.

Tonight, it bit me.

The host field is limited to 50 characters. Never mind that FQDN can be much longer than that. That’s the only poor design decision I’ve seen in this product.

It was simple enough to fix. I’m running this on PostgreSQL. Phorum 5 doesn’t have a PostgreSQL module yet. I’m supposed to write that.

Here’s the fix:


begin;
alter table article_feedback add column host_new text;
update article_feedback set host_new = host;
alter table article_feedback alter host_new set default ''::bpchar;
alter table article_feedback alter host_new set not null;
alter table article_feedback rename host to host_old;
alter table article_feedback rename host_new to host;
commit;


Repeat, for all tables related to the body of a phorum.