Re: What Does "Fatal error: Call to undefined function phorum_ob_clean() in /web/fairfaxunderground/html/phorum/common.php on line 2191" MEAN?
Posted by:
PGue4
()
Date: June 04, 2015 11:25AM
My guess is that the software is slightly damaged, and this is being exposed by a transient database error occurring.
If someone were to mistakenly edit out the phorum_ob_clean() function from common.php, then line 2191 would correspond to a CALL to phorum_ob_clean.
Normally, in the official source code, line 2191 is not a call to this function; it's a comment line near the beginning of the database error handler. The first thing the handler does is to call phorum_ob_clean() discard any pending web output, so that the error message page will not get messed up. So, that's probably the nearby call that is going wrong.
It's self-explanatory that the function is not defined, but the question is "How could that be?". Well, it just so happens that phorum_ob_clean is (in the official sources) defined right there, right before phorum_database_error.
Apparently the function has been edited out of the source code; that would make line 2191 correspond exactly to the call from phorum_database_error.
Somehow, the software has been corrupted. I am guessing that someone accidentally edited it out by hand, or something. (Or maybe they applied some botched up patch. Or maybe it was an upgrade installation that went wrong, rather than a clean install.)
In any event, that function got deleted from what should be line 2168.
Sometimes when posting, there are transient errors attributed to the database. (This is believable.) The error handler tries to do its thing and fails right away, resulting in yet another error, which is the one you see.
Do I get the job now?