Settings.php Error

wesbos

Hi guys, Out community runs great on vanilla but every so often everything explodes and all we see is: Parse error: parse error, unexpected $ in /home/content/s/n/a/snaxsnax/html/board/conf/settings.php on line 74 It is like this on a white page until I delete settings.php and upload a backup. Sometimes it happens twice a day, sometimes it doesn't happen for a month. Any ideas?

Wanderer

Something is screwing with the settings file when you change a setting.

Most likely a badly coded extension or a combination of extensions not working well together.

Make a list of likely suspects and go through one at a time, make a change, save it and wait a day or so.

Keep that working backup though!

wesbos

Im not changing any of my settings, could it be a user changing their settings?

WallPhone

Users don't normally have the ability to change that file. There are a few extensions that aren't very well behaved and try to unnesessarily update the file on every page load, which creates a possibility that it can become corrupted. There was a fix put in to Vanilla [...can't remember what version...] that ignores these settings updates if they are unecessary. So if you are running something other than 1.1.5, you might want to try updating.

Dinoboff

Can you keep the corrupted file next time, so that we can guess what happened. What is around line 74? They is two possible bugs that could explain it: http://lussumo.com/bugs/discussion/60/corruption-of-configuration-files/ http://lussumo.com/bugs/discussion/41/locking-file-before-updating-it/ Also if you don't change the settings, you can set the permission to read only on conf/settings.php, Let us know which add-on doesn't work anymore.