PHP 4 Upgraded for Security

We’ve updated PHP 4 on our servers to cover six recently identified security issues. Users shouldn’t notice any changes.

An upgrade for PHP 5 is also in progress. After testing, we actually rolled out the update onto our servers for a short time, until a customer reported an unusual problem with vBulletin posts getting cut off when they contain an odd number of apostrophes shortly afterward. This problem appears to be related to the update, so we have rolled back to the previous version of PHP 5 while we investigate this. (This kind of thing is very rare: this is the first security update in over year that has caused a problem. We have a suite of “regression tests” that we use to test PHP upgrades, and there wasn’t a general problem with it. We’ll follow up with more details when we know more.)

By the way, if you’re unfamiliar with what we mean by a “security update”, this page will help.