I made a small change to handle older comments the same way as the recent ones. Years ago HTML was allowed in comments, which can be quite messy, so I converted the HTML of old comments to BBcode so now all are managed the same way.

I also had to mass-replace some dead smilies in comments: at a moment people were using smilies from a site that changed their structure, so instead of a small 16x16 smiley these comments had a huge generic crying smiley occupying the whole screen. I replaced these by a block like this:
[dead external link to a smiley]
(not very pretty, but it is explicit)

This is to do on my list to change that smiley that took the whole page to another link that works (the d'oh smack at the head) smiley I posted some time ago.

I should maybe have kept the original smiley name for easier replacement. If you search on the text I mentioned earlier in your old comments, you can still find all the smilies to replace

That's okay

The current active site that has smacking to the forehead:

Maybe we need our own smacking to the forehead

For static smilies they could be uploaded like comment pictures, but for animated ones indeed there is no solution. I should maybe add some smiley some time

I'll soon disable the site for a few minutes, to change something in the database to try to solve the issue of delay when posting new comments at peak times.

edit: maintenance in progress

It takes longer than expected. On the test database the last step only took a few seconds, on the real database it is busy since several minutes, I don't know what it is doing...
(I took a backup before all of that, just in case, so I can always recover everything from that)

I had to force restarting the database service, it seems to be OK now, I re-enabled the site, but I'm keeping the site read-only for some time (one hour or so) to be sure all works.
Please reporting anything strange that you notice (if you notice that all seems OK after browsing the site for some time, you can report it too).

At the same time, I'm also updating the https certificates, as it was still using those from the old server, which expire within 2 weeks. There should not be visible change for that, but again if you notice something, don't hesitate to report it here.

I'll switch back the vehicle table to the old system, as it seems to have performances issues. I'll investigate that later.
Keeping the comments table with the new structure, as it was the one causing more slowness.

I unlocked the changes, I hope it will work fine now, we'll see how it behaves compared to before when the site has some load due to the bots.

The "all comments" page seem slow when going to the older pages, but that's maybe something that has not much interest anyway: only recent pages are useful there, I assume that nobody browse that beyond the pages of the last few days.

Maybe I should simplify the pagination there and remove the pages after the "..." as it is not useful to see that there are more than 60k pages of comments anyway

Restarted the database service to change a setting, it may be slow for a few minutes.
By default it uses 128 MB for the cache of the InnoDB tables (the new format used), but that server has 32 GB memory with 75% unused, so it should make use of all that memory

I'll soon apply an update to the site, for a few minutes it will be deactivated for that. More info to follow.

Deactivating the site for a few minutes, while updating files.

Site updated. I'll unlock it. If you notice any error message or strange behavior, please report it here.

Here are the new features from this update:
- Any member with contribution rights can now submit pictures for vehicles that do not have one yet (like they can create new vehicle pages), but these pictures will have to be validated by admins of course.
- Replacing pictures can be done by non-admin members who have the new special right to do it. We'll probably give these to all the regular contributors so they can use that feature rather than having to post in comments or send me zip files. If you plan to replace pics of a movie in the next days, don't hesitate to ask to test it.
- When a pic is replaced, no need to force refresh, in most of the cases it should display the new pic (if you are logged in on the site). Thumbnail images are not automatically refreshed in that case, though, but that's much less an issue (Ctrl+F5 can still force the refresh of thumbnails on movie page if you want to be sure they are updated).
- Some optimisation in the "all comments" page, the total number of pages is not displayed but you can easily go to the oldest comments via a link after the list of first page numbers.
- Movie title search: default similar search is limited to 1 page (as next ones are usually not useful for that search) but for all other title searches still have their page numbering
- Some CSS changes with the few icons displayed (e.g. delete/quote/edit/etc., language switch except flag icons), these changes should not be visible, hoping there is no bug Also included directly in the CSS some small graphical elements to reduce the number of files.

Everything seems to work fine so far, nice updates.

The only thing I'd change it's the 'Reject (delete) all pending vehicles' option which would be better to put it in a different colour (red?) or splitting it from the other two options as it could be easily chosen by mistake instead of validating. Or maybe there is already a confirmation button after clicking it?

I would also make validating the top option, and move the Pending option to the middle.

Good ideas, I modified the page to change the order, and added in front of the text the emojis ✔ / ➖ / ❌ to make them more identifiable.
Funny that here the first one appears black, but on the site it is green, on the same browser

I don't know if anyone has ran into this issue but when I tried to delete a vehicle entry I just added it wouldn't let me.

I get this error
Management: Delete a vehicle
Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function CheckVehicleContrib() in /var/www/imcdb/delete-vehicle.php:9 Stack trace: #0 {main} thrown in /var/www/imcdb/delete-vehicle.php on line 9

I don't need the vehicle re-added, just need it gone.

One other thing I noticed that is specific to the validators, when Terra updated the film Cyberbully, with both updated pics (our first guinea pig) and some new ones, the title is listed at the top of the Validating list, even though it was added last.