Hello

5) I know that we have at least a few duplicate email addresses, so I will clean up the DB before proceeding.

Yes, that is definitively necessary. I recommend to create a second backup of the current state after the check for doublettes for the case of a failing upgrade in the furter process steps.

Yes, will definitely do this.

Even when it should – why ever – be impossible to upgrade to one of the latest versions (20220508.1 or newer), you would be able to install the version 2.4.24 and to restore the second backup because it has the correct structure.

Wow, 500,000 entries? That's a lot.

Yes, 494,000 entries. It is a lot, but we’ve never purged any records to date. Performance has suffered dramatically recently, so one of the drivers for the upgrade was, well, to get our forum current and see if we still have performance issues.

We changed a lot by creating database indexes for the columns, that are part of table joins and where clauses. The performance increased mentionable. But please do not expect the forum to load at rocket speed. There are still performance issues when reading database entries.

Tschö, Auge