XF 2.3 XF 2.3.6 Upgrade -- Problems with Member Post History and DB -- Need Help

[Paul McM]

Topic: Major Problems after upgrade to XF 2.3.6 on 5/14/25

Folks, we need some help here. We have a Forum with 74,000 registered members and about 15k active over a 30-day period

1. We did an upgrade to XF 2.3.6 yesterday.
We now have multiple problems.

1. The Forum has slowed down, particularly when clicking on a Thread title. Initially it was very slow, but we turned off a number of add-ons that helped.

2. BIG Issue. When you click on a user profile and then select the "Find" button, it offers "find all content by [user name]" and "find all threads by [user name]".

This is NOT working properly. No content or threads show at all
OR, one sees only posts prior to June 2012, or with thread request, one sees threads prior to June 2012.

NOTE: More current user posts DO appear if one uses the Search function and searches by member name.
Meaning I can confirm there are posts from 2012-2025 but only by using the SEARCH function.

But to repeat, when any user clicks on "Find" within a user profile it is NOT returning current posts or current threads more recent than June 2012.

3. Files in Database (70% Increase)

Before the upgrade, we had about 6800 files listed in the Admin area.
Now, after upgrade to XF 2.3.6 there are over 15,800 files. See:



Does this mean something went wrong with the data files during the upgrade?

The main concern is that paying members are shocked that they cannot access their post history via "Find", and record of threads started.

If you guys have any suggestions, please let us know. We don't want to have to revert to our back-up of previous version.

 

[Jeremy P]

If the "Find content" tools are returning old/stale results, it means your search index is out of date. You can rebuild the search index from the CLI or control panel rebuild tools to bring it up to date, but note it is resource intensive so it may degrade performance while running.

The file count is correct, largely owing to the icon subsetting approach we take in 2.3. These are files on disk and not the database itself.

 

[Paul McM]

Jeremy P -- Thank you for the information on the files number. To go from 6800 to 15800+ is a 75% increase and we were concerned this indicated major issues. But I guess that is OK.

User Profile "FIND" not working -- Please note that the posts/threads DO appear when one does a search for the member's name using the separate search tool on the top of the Forum.

We have tried to rebuild the search index, but maybe did it incorrectly. Is it one of the cache rebuild options?

AI says: "To rebuild the search index in XenForo, navigate to the Admin Control Panel (ACP), go to Tools > Data maintenance > Rebuild caches, and select the "Rebuild Search Index" option. This will initiate a process that rebuilds the search index, which may take some time depending on your server and database size. "

 

[Jeremy P]

We have tried to rebuild the search index, but maybe did it incorrectly. Is it one of the cache rebuild options?

You can find it at Control panel > Tools > Rebuild caches (admin.php?tools/rebuild), however...

User Profile "FIND" not working -- Please note that the posts/threads DO appear when one does a search for the member's name using the separate search tool on the top of the Forum.

If content appears in a regular searches but not via the "Find" tools, then something else may be at play since the find tools use the search system scoped to a user under the hood. It may be worth trying on a default style with all add-ons disabled, and failing that with a freshly rebuilt search index as well. If that still doesn't work, I'm not sure why that would be off the top of my head.

 

[jeb35]

What version of XF were you running before the upgrade? Please note that if you have a lot of addons installed that were compatible with the older version then some may not be compatible to 2.3 without the addon being updated first before the upgrade. At this point, you may want to disable all addons completely and see if that changes anything.

 

[Paul McM]

Thank you. We did have many add-ons. These have been updated (or removed if no longer compatible). We have learned the lesson to turn OFF most add-ons before the update.

The biggest problem seemed to be the cache. We had to rebuild the cache multiple times. First, two attempts at "All" cache rebuilds failed. Then I tried "Threads" cache rebuild followed by "Posts" cache rebuild. I had to run the "Posts" cache rebuild twice and the second time took about 1/2 hour, but it worked.

I don't understand why, but before the "posts" rebuild a search of a user posts was NOT showing posts (but showing something else entirely).

After the "Posts" cache rebuild, it appears that the search is working again.