infopop simply leads people astray, does not give clear warnings and instructions, allows more and more people to screw up their databases, their boards, and to lose hours and hours of time!!!
I never had a warning. The altertable php has no warnings that this might time out and thus corrupt the database. No explanation what to do in case of a timeout.
Simply, in my case, the upgrade cannot be done the way they say it. When I ran the altertable php from the telnet command line, one part took almost 2 hours. There is no web routine that reliably does such a chore without timeout. Just not possible.
A well documented software gives clear warnings. Maybe prints a time estimate for the duration of the data base manipulation before starting the routine.
They could easily just give a altertable file with mysql database commands, instead of web based commands for dummies. Maybe upgrade in batches of 10 000.
Infopop people try to make things easy, and this way they REALLY make it complicated!!!! Clicking away happily at routines that are DOOMED to fail is not good. Looks easy until the corruption surfaces.
While I am complaining, maybe someone at infopop is interested in the fact that wwwthreads.com and wwwthreads.org web sites are dead. No forwarding, just plain dead. No problem for me, but lost business opportunities for infopop.
