SQUARE PEGS AND SUCH: A TTP BULLETIN

TTPers,

The TTP Forum has been offline for several days due to what software engineers call technical debt. This means the slow accumulation of outdated software that eventually stops working when the world around it upgrades. Our site runs on WordPress 4.6.1, which is a content management system (CMS) that handles everything from publishing articles to running the discussion forum.

WordPress is built on a programming language called PHP, which is short for Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP runs on the web server and generates the pages you see in your browser.

Here’s the issue: the version of WordPress we’re using was written to work with PHP 4.6.1, a version released almost a decade ago. Our hosting company recently upgraded to a newer PHP environment for speed and security reasons. That’s good for the modern internet, but bad for older websites.

Many of the WordPress plug-ins (small software modules that add features like logins, forums, and security filters) depend on PHP functions that no longer exist in the latest releases. When the server runs the new code, these old plug-ins simply break.

Fixing it takes time. Each plug-in and custom script has to be reviewed, rewritten, or replaced with something compatible. Once that is done, the system’s internal connections, or what programmers call “dependencies,” must be rebuilt so all parts of WordPress communicate smoothly with the upgraded PHP software once again. Only then can the forum come back online without risking crashes or data corruption.

This points to a larger trend in technology. Major software vendors such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, and now even open-source communities like WordPress, have largely abandoned backward compatibility. Microsoft’s roll out of Windows 11 was the signal flare: millions of perfectly good machines were declared “incompatible,” forcing users to buy new hardware or be left behind. What used to be a stable foundation for long-term projects has turned into a treadmill of mandatory updates.

In theory, these upgrades improve speed and security. In practice, they often punish reliability and independence. Communities like ours get caught in the crossfire between security patches and corporate upgrade cycles. The digital commons that once empowered small publishers and free thinkers now quietly depends on staying aligned with a constantly shifting software ecosystem.

We’re rebuilding TTP carefully and deliberately right now, cleaning out obsolete code, modernizing the architecture, and preparing it for long-term resilience in alignment with the latest WordPress update. When the forum returns, it will run faster, safer, and stronger, and free from the brittle legacy code that caused this downtime.

This isn’t the end of anything. It’s a refit. It is a new keel under an old ship, so it can keep sailing through whatever digital storms Silicon Valley brews next.