For a variety of reasons, we've moved bicon.org.uk and the BiCon sites from every year back to 1996 to a new server. If you can't see this post, your browser is looking at the old one 🙂
The previous one was set up in October 2017. As with this one, it's an imaginary PC (a 'Virtual Private Server') that's actually a slice of the memory, disk space and processing power of a larger one. It looks to the world like a real PC, but it's much cheaper to hire because the supplier can sell several VPSes running on the same hardware and it's also less fuss to for us run in several ways. (If something goes wrong with the real hardware, for example, it's not us at a data centre replacing stuff and it's reasonably simple for the supplier to move a VPS onto new real hardware.)
It's been the opportunity to do a few things that weren't done in 2015, including making the sites before then use TLS – they're all 'https' rather than 'http' now.
Interestingly, the three that gave the most issues were the oldest three that started off as WordPress sites: 2010, 2011, and 2012.
WordPress works by running some code on the server in a language called PHP. It interacts with a database to know what to display on any page. The code is the same between every site running the same version of WordPress: it's the contents of the database that make it different.
Well, that's not completely true: WordPress allows you to separate out the content of the website, the words and pictures, from how they look, the 'theme'. Themes involve some PHP code too, so sites with different themes do have some different code.
All but the most recent couple of years' WordPress sites have been converted, by a neat addon to WordPress, to 'static' sites. This cuts the time taken to show a site because there's no PHP and no database – all the webserver has to do is deliver simple HTML files. The way it was done means it's possible to go back to them being a WordPress site and on several, it was done so that links to the hellsite formerly known as Twitter have been changed to point elsewhere, for example, before making them static again.
The problems came because the original conversions to become static was done to those three websites some years ago and since then, various things have changed with PHP. What worked with PHP5 doesn't, it turns out, necessarily work with PHP8. And the themes that the organisers of those BiCons picked haven't been updated in many years, are all in PHP5, and include bits that don't run on the new server.
So they've had their old static code edited 'by hand' in a text editor. There are a couple of other sites where the conversion is not yet perfect, but they'll get there…