Your forum shouldnt take itself offline. Look for other reasons it may have done so.
Stash - I wondered that, I guess it's a cross between mark being lazy (as we all know he is, this 'work' thing is just a cover :D) an also him wanting it out in the wild for a while incase any new security issues come up - obviously it would be reassuring to have the community on the latest version but at the same time IF something went massively wrong it would be more reassuring to know the community site would stay up while we worked through the issue (assuming 1.1.2 wasnt vulnerable aswell, ofcourse)... I'm not sure but that seems reasonable to me anyway. I'd vote No. 1 as the main reason though.
Of course they do, because they made a backup of their database and forum before upgrading. Because if they didn't do that, then they only have the right to be "Pi$$ed" at themselves don't they
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You also have to recreate conf/settings.php; it should look like:
<?php // Application Settings $Configuration['SETUP_TEST'] = '1'; $Configuration['APPLICATION_PATH'] = '/path/to/vanillaforum/'; $Configuration['DATABASE_PATH'] = '/path/to/vanillaforum/conf/database.php'; $Configuration['LIBRARY_PATH'] = '/path/to/vanillaforum/library/'; $Configuration['EXTENSIONS_PATH'] = '/path/to/vanillaforum/extensions/'; $Configuration['LANGUAGES_PATH'] = '/path/to/vanillaforum/languages/'; $Configuration['THEME_PATH'] = '/path/to/vanillaforum/themes/vanilla/'; $Configuration['DEFAULT_STYLE'] = '/path/to/vanillaforum/styles/default/'; $Configuration['WEB_ROOT'] = '/vanillaforum/'; $Configuration['BASE_URL'] = 'http://ballofspray.com/vanillaforum/'; $Configuration['FORWARD_VALIDATED_USER_URL'] = 'http://ballofspray.com/vanillaforum/'; $Configuration['SUPPORT_EMAIL'] = 'Horton@ballofspray.com'; $Configuration['SUPPORT_NAME'] = 'Horton'; $Configuration['APPLICATION_TITLE'] = 'Vanilla Forum'; $Configuration['BANNER_TITLE'] = 'Vanilla Forum'; $Configuration['COOKIE_DOMAIN'] = 'ballofspray.com'; $Configuration['COOKIE_PATH'] = '/vanillaforum/'; $Configuration['SETUP_COMPLETE'] = '1'; ?>Then go through Vanilla's settings to make sure they are all as they should be.