I haven't really bothered keeping PC up to date, but I'll spend a little time getting it back up and going.

 

PatronusCharm was well and dead, the version of PHP it was written for has long since passed end of life, updating it for PHP7+ would be a fairly large effort for such a dead website written in an era of poor security.

I spent a few hours and rewrote the story display element at least in a stable+safer language, such that existing links to stories should continue working.

Notably, you can't yet list stories or look at reviews, but I'll be working on those next. But, it'll continue to be a read-only service going forward. Use FFN or AO3.

 

PHP does not attempt to maintain backwards compatibility as strictly as say, Java or C++. It also doesn't emit an executable binary which is ~usable forever (modulo shared library or ISA changes), it's an interpreter, therefore your need an interpreter which understands your code in perpetuity

So, here's the thought process:

• PatronusCharm was written in 2005. It hasn't materially changed since then.
• It doesn't run on PHP7. I could install PHP5, but given that it's at its end of life, that makes PatronusCharm an extra security risk. This is in addition to the numerous security vulnerabilities I've found just looking over the source with the addition of 15 more years of programming experience.
• Multiple libraries (not insignificant ones) provided by PECL don't work on PHP7. This means I need to rewrite or fix those too.
• PatronusCharm has a grand total of 377 stories on it. It was clearly well-loved.
• It's been down for almost a year and I haven't bothered fixing it. It took til May for anyone to even notice. The search function was down for years.

With so little usage, it isn't worth maintaining. Therefore I am not "rewriting it", I'm putting it on life support. The new binary will continue to safely serve read-only pages of the existing content without my need to maintain code to fit newer PHP versions. The attack surface will be incredibly minimal, which makes it more attractive for long-term support.

Beyond that, I don't write PHP anymore (and haven't for more than a decade now). It's not a language or an ecosystem I enjoy. I've chosen to write the read only archive in a language with those properties (it's a compiled binary, the language commits to backward compatibility) that I can "set and forget", given it's otherwise not worth my time to even manage. My effort was justified, it only took a few hours to build what's available now and apart from the initial investment will otherwise be entirely forgettable.

However, if you disagree, you're more than welcome to take on the project yourself.