I've now upgraded the MFGG mainsite to PHP 8.2! It took a few more tweaks to get the mainsite software up from 7.4 to 8.2, but it's well worth the trouble. This upgrade puts MFGG on the latest and greatest PHP architecture, helping us improve performance, security, and stability. It also gives us access to PHP features that older versions lack.
Here's an update on other mainsite technical details:
Performance If you've visited the mainsite in recent weeks, there's a very good chance you might've noticed some performance issues. Maybe a page loaded really slowly, or maybe it even timed out and threw an error. We've experienced those issues too, and we've been investigating the root cause and experimenting as we look for a permanent solution. These performance issues have nothing to do with any of the PHP or HTML/CSS changes we've made - they appear to stem from unusual bot traffic.
Bugs We've noticed some issues with updating existing submissions in recent weeks. If you try to update an existing submission, the page might crash. That's not good. On the QC staff side, trying to approve an updated submission in the queue leads to an SQL error. Uploading and approving new submissions is working fine, thankfully. While people don't update submissions extremely frequently, we're aware that this is a bad user experience, and fixing this is at the top of my to-do list.
If you notice any other bugs, large or small, please speak up! Tell me exactly what happened so I can debug the problem - the more details, the better. The Suggestions board on the MFGG forums is the best place to note a bug.
HTML/CSS updates The original version of the mainsite software is two decades old, so it has used some older standards. If you use a tool like the W3C Validator on a lot of pages, you might get up to a thousand errors/warnings! I've been working on fixing some deprecated code (things like valign, border, and cellspacing) - either removing unneeded code or replacing it with modern CSS.
There is a small chance that these changes could affect the page layout. In some cases, a table might grow or shrink by a pixel or two - I don't think anyone's going to notice that. But it is conceivable that one of those valign properties was needed after all and the alignment is out of whack. If anything feels off, let me know.
Thanks for being patient as we drag TCSMS into this brave new world, also known as "2025".
