Downtime for forum software upgrade

[namida]

At some point in the next hour or so, the forum will be temporarily unavailable while I upgrade to SMF 2.1.7.

This will only affect LemmingsForums.net; other sites on the server (such as NeoLemmix.com) will not be affected.

[namida]

The upgrade is now complete. Please report any new issues that arise.

Attempting to use SMF's built in upgrade did not work. I thus proceeded with the usual method of branch / merge wizardry. But it occurred to me - it makes more sense to keep a branch of vanilla SMF in the repo, to make it quicker next time around. So that's what the "smf-vanilla" branch on the repo is for.

[IchoTolot]

I've noticed the disappearance of a lot of forum avatars, including mine.

I suspect this is the issue. 

[namida]

Ah, yeah.

They weren't gitignore'd properly in the repo, but weren't generally being copied manually when updates were occuring. They also weren't being included in the backups. I fixed the backup script to include them while doing this update, including that the backup I ran just before the update was with the new version of the script - so this time, I am able to restore them (and have now done so). And going forward, they should no longer be a problem (but can be restored from the backup if they are).