Anime-Beta is offline: Help needed.

As many of you know, Anime-Beta has been unavailable for several days due to a server system upgrade that requires that the site be reconfigured. Rekka, the administrator in charge of hosting the site reports: "The issue beta now has is that its connection with the database has depreciated since my host upgraded the PHP to 7.1. This is apparently incompatible with beta as it is now and other configurations are necessary."

Can someone post or message me a current email or PM handle for Magician, the previous technical administrator, whose knowledge of such matters may be necessary at this time?

Thank you! Bear with us as Beta is important to many of us and we are doing our best to get it back up and running.

Magician's email and cell number have been messaged to me. Thanks all who responded to this request. We hope to resolve this problem soon and get Beta back online.

Sensei, I don't know if feedback is working here but I tried sending you a message (this is zerospace, btw). You guys need to upgrade to a new version of phpBB more than likely. The PHP dev team announced the deprecation of the old mysql extension awhile ago (I know, because I was dreading changing all my code over).

Is Beta heavily modded that you can't do an upgrade?

I figured there was a software problem when I kept getting mysql-connect errors.

I tried setting up PHP and MySQL many years ago. I got it to work, but it was a terrible pain in the neck. I'd be afraid to even imagine it now.

I'm sure this has been thought of already, but just in case it wasn't, I feel compelled to ask-Has the database containing the boad's data been backed up recently? If not, it would be a good idea.

Thanks for the suggestions, which have been forwarded to Rekka and Magician. I don't think Beta is over-Modded, I just think it's under-Adminned (speaking as one of the Administrators). And of course everyone is doing this as volunteer work in bits of time grabbed out of the usual everyday jobs and evening responsibilities that we already have. (As does Jason with this website...)

Progress is being made, though, and I'll pass on reports as merited.