OK, I searched but didn't find any really helpful or useful information regarding this topic.

My company forums, which runs UbbThreads version 6.3 and I'm trying to update the forums to 6.5. Now, I have tried this about 25 times (no less), and every time I try to update, I always run into road block at the language update portion of this update, and each time yield a different error. Before you ask if I have uploaded all files properly, yes, that's what I live for, I practice to perfection the art of uploading the necessary files from Infopop.

Originally, there are roughly 12 language files in the Languages directory because we have a need to support these languages. During the update process I had to run all the altertables to bring the board up to 6.4.1 to continue to the upgrade page, and that went kinda smoothly, with the exception of some sql errors. When come to the Language update, after having verified all permissions are set to allow ISUR_<name> full permission of the directory, I click on "Update My Language Files". That, of course didn't go very far, with the update telling me that it didn't have permission to the "Admin" folder of various languages, and some other .php files, that didn't exist anywhere in those folders.

So what did I do? I deleted all the language folders, save for the English language (because that's the only folder that has the proper folder structure required) and tried to continue, and very reliable, it gave me error. So what I had to do was just delete everything in the language folder, and upload just that English folder from the upgrade download. Again, some of the time, it'll give me errors, but did update, other times, it told me that I need to include $ubbt_lang['PHRASE'] = "Use quotes around a phrase to search for a phrase. Use spaces around the word to match the exact word. Example " word ""; in a searchtips.php file, but didn't really tell me where to place the command.

I don't think you guys want to read about the rest of my experience with UbbThreads, but, if you know what might have caused the problems, please clue me in. I know I'll have some not very pleasant dreams about UBBThreads tonite. I've aslo contacted Infopop, but seems I cannot get a straight answer despite me giving them access to look at the file structures. Help?

Is this running on IIS or Apache?
Are the language files writeable?

Alternatively you could run the update localy on a similar setup and see whether it bombs out there as well. If not then there is some peculiarity with your hosting company.

Just thinking out loud

ASP, IIS, just to make sure that the site has the appropriate permissions, I gave the site full control of the entire ubbthreads directory. I am updating the forum locally on a test server, we host our own servers, both test and live server. That's how I was able to restore and update, and restore and update, and restore and update... you get the point.

The contents of the test server is the exact back up of the live server (may be a couple of weeks old, since I started trying to update). All this got dropped on my laps a couple of months back, and I was informed that Infopop performed the upgrade to the current version 6.3. I have no idea what was done, and how. I have a mirror thread going on the Infopop UbbThreads board, and so far, no answers.

This is indeed weird. If you gave Everyone full permissions to the site and you have inheritance in IIS then it should allow practically everyone to work on that folder including the .threads script. I don't know why it should bomb out on the language files.

Another suggestion: Why not run the script until the language files part and then open the script and run whatever query is there (database) one by one... That might help identifying the cause at least

I don't know if this is a related problem, but our forums currently cannot display Chinese characters. When typing in Chinese characters, the forums would convert them to Unicode. When some one select the Forums language to be Chinese, they receive an error and cannot log back in until I reset their language option.