Fatal error: Your phpList version is older than two years

ℹ️ Support
12

Hi All, let’s group together the information into a single post that should give most people the answers they’re looking for.

Apology

Sorry that this has caused significant disruption. The version check was introduced two years ago and not everyone in the core contributors team were aware of it. Advance notice should have been provided to you so as to avoid a shock. Sorry that it wasn’t.

Purpose

Running old versions of phpList is very bad idea. For security and legal reasons alone, running a version older than 2 years will cause you headaches over time. Those headaches are bad for users, administrators, and the reputation of the project. They also mean this support community spends time on issues that were previously fixed, or cannot be reproduced by support-providers.

In some specific cases it is hard or impossible to upgrade phpList. For my perspective those cases are invitations to address the underlying causes, not expose your users, servers, and legal entities to avoidable risks.

Workaround

You can disable the message and the corresponding check by deleting these lines from your admin/index.php file. Note that the code, not the line numbers, should be checked, because the line numbers are different in different versions of phpList:

    if (defined('RELEASEDATE') && ((time() - RELEASEDATE) / 31536000) > 2) {
    Fatal_Error(s('Your phpList version is older than two years. Please %supgrade phpList</a> before continuing.</br>
        Visit <a href="https://www.phplist.org/users/" title="'.s('Get some help').'">the support site</a> if you need some help.'
        ,'<a href="https://www.phplist.com/download?utm_source=pl'.VERSION.'&amp;utm_medium=outdated-download-forced&amp;utm_campaign=phpList" title="'.s('Download the latest version').'" target="_blank">'));
    return;
}

Fix

An alternative way of handling this version cut off point will be worked on and find it’s way into a future release, probably next month.

Thanks for your attention; I’ll mark this post as the solution to this thread.

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