Solved Forum lost categories after upgrade to J4

Hello Kunena Team

I've tried scouring these boards to see if I can find similar issues, and some of them are similar, but don't seem to have missing sections and categories.

My server admin and dev uninstalled J3 and reinstalled after upgrade as per the documentation, which we only discovered after a test site installation didn't do too well. There were issues uninstalling Kunena entirely on the J3 live site and I don't think the menu was removed and some plugins also couldn't be uninstalled. All were disabled and I deleted what I could from the J4 admin that looked like it was still a vestige of the J3 installation. (I have tried on the dev site to recreate the menu several times, and the same issues persist as I describe below). 

On  my live site, the old menu seemed to be there, and displays the recent posts. However there are no sections or categories except on the breadcrumbs on the front end linking to the posts.
If I try to create any sections or categories on the backend, I receive the following notification:
An error has occurred.
1054 Unknown column 'parentid' in 'where clause'
(which I see there is another post about, but this error comes up frequently in the dashboard options for me)
Running the diagnostics tool comes up with the same error.

On the front end
when I click on one of the breadcrumb categories, there is a notification that there are no categories in this section.
after logging in and trying to create a new post, I receive a 403 Forbidden error that I don't have permissions, or haven't created/published a top level category.
I also managed to get an error that rendering the Kunena layout.
(Please see the screenshots attached).
Please find the configuration report copied below; I realise I haven't updated today to the very latest version, but that didn't change any of these issues on my test site.
Any pointers or suggestions will be most welcome

Thanks,
Alison

Database collation check: bacpv_kunena_aliases have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field alias  bacpv_kunena_aliases have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field type  bacpv_kunena_aliases have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field item  bacpv_kunena_announcement have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field title  bacpv_kunena_announcement have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field sdescription  bacpv_kunena_announcement have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field description  bacpv_kunena_attachments have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field hash  bacpv_kunena_attachments have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field folder  bacpv_kunena_attachments have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field filetype  bacpv_kunena_attachments have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field filename  bacpv_kunena_attachments have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field filename_real  bacpv_kunena_attachments have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field caption  bacpv_kunena_categories have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field name  bacpv_kunena_categories have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field alias  bacpv_kunena_categories have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field icon  bacpv_kunena_categories have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field accesstype  bacpv_kunena_categories have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field channels  bacpv_kunena_categories have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field description  bacpv_kunena_categories have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field headerdesc  bacpv_kunena_categories have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field class_sfx  bacpv_kunena_categories have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field topic_ordering  bacpv_kunena_categories have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field iconset  bacpv_kunena_categories have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field params  bacpv_kunena_configuration have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field params  bacpv_kunena_logs have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field ip  bacpv_kunena_logs have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field operation  bacpv_kunena_messages have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field name  bacpv_kunena_messages have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field email  bacpv_kunena_messages have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field subject  bacpv_kunena_messages have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field ip  bacpv_kunena_messages have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field modified_reason  bacpv_kunena_polls have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field title  bacpv_kunena_polls_options have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field text  bacpv_kunena_ranks have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field rank_title  bacpv_kunena_ranks have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field rank_image  bacpv_kunena_sessions have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field allowed  bacpv_kunena_sessions have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field readtopics  bacpv_kunena_smileys have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field code  bacpv_kunena_smileys have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field location  bacpv_kunena_smileys have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field greylocation  bacpv_kunena_topics have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field subject  bacpv_kunena_topics have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field first_post_message  bacpv_kunena_topics have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field first_post_guest_name  bacpv_kunena_topics have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field last_post_message  bacpv_kunena_topics have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field last_post_guest_name  bacpv_kunena_topics have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field params  bacpv_kunena_user_categories have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field params  bacpv_kunena_user_topics have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field params  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field status_text  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field view  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field signature  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field avatar  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field personalText  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field location  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field icq  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field yim  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field microsoft  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field telegram  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field vk  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field skype  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field twitter  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field facebook  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field google  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field myspace  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field linkedin  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field delicious  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field friendfeed  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field digg  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field instagram  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field qzone  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field weibo  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field wechat  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field apple  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field blogspot  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field flickr  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field bebo  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field websitename  bacpv_kunena_users have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field websiteurl  bacpv_kunena_users_banned have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field ip  bacpv_kunena_users_banned have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field reason_private  bacpv_kunena_users_banned have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field reason_public  bacpv_kunena_users_banned have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field comments  bacpv_kunena_users_banned have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field params  bacpv_kunena_version have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field version  bacpv_kunena_version have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field versionname  bacpv_kunena_version have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field state  
        

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Kunena version detailed: Kunena 6.1.3 | 2023-08-10 [ Git Repository ]
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I assume you've read it?
and that answer #6 does not work in your case?
www.kunena.org/forum/installation-issues...-where-clause#227543
if you can look into database with phpmyadmin you would there let's search for kunena_private the four should encounter like my example picture

Thank you Leen. Did read that post, and have visited the dashboard multiple times, but can't configure much without the error.
I will try your suggested phpmyadmin search; seems those could perhaps be missing according to the front end error message.

If I removed the kunena_private in my test site
I can't create or view threads anyway.
But I don't think that's why you can't see categories
Have you tried going into the admin section
Kunena Forum: Select categories all and press the publich button
to push ?
and if you click on Diagnostics at Kunena Forum: Tools and look there are errors there

Thank you. Those tables don't exist. Have gone to the categories on the dashboard and there is nothing to publish there. The diagnostics just throws the error. But I will try again.

I see the db errors in the config I posted for moderators states that
dbxxx_kunena_aliases have wrong collation of type utf8_general_ci on field title, name etc etc
and it goes all the way listing many tables -kunena_announcement, attachments, categories, logs, users etc.
So it seems the DB didn't upgrade?
I'm going to try again, and see if the private settings are off in the configuration. And will attempt to select all categories and publish, even though I can't see any there. 
And try the diagnostics tool again. Maybe I'll be lucky

I think you recently upgraded everything to Joomla 4 and Kunena 6.1.3.1
Maybe if you still have a good Akeeba Backup
Try again locally with Wampserver or Xampp
Think something went wrong with upgrade process
try again and follow these steps
www.kunena.org/docs/en/basics/upgrade/upgrade-k6-0

Yes thanks. Nothing else seems to be working at all.

We have the exact same issue here after upgrading.
So this is not an isolated issue.

www.kunena.org/docs/en/basics/upgrade/upgrade-k6-0
if you read this explanation = Especially point 2 is important
Uninstall Kunena through the Joomla extension manager
are you sure you did that.

Yes we did try to uninstall using the J3 extension manager prior to migrating, but it didn't uninstall the extension but resulted in an error (sorry, I didn't save the error message). So I manually uninstalled the extension (removing  all the plugins components etc, then making sure all the folders were removed, then removing it from the _extensions table). And still ran into this problem.

And, due to the complexity and size of this site, we really didn't want to spend time re-migrating the previous J3 to J4 not knowing if it would work again.

HOWEVER ... I was able to get it working by manually migrating the data into a clean install.

1. I had a SQL back-up of each of the Kunena tables from our J3 site.
2. I completely removed Kunena from J4 - using the tools area to remove it - so everything was wiped out
3. Re-install latest 6.x version of Kunena in J4
5. Manually import via SQL all the data from the old tables*
6. Manually set all the Configuration settings via the Kunena configuration screen
7. Re-created all the Kunena menus on the J4 site

Once that was done everything appears to be working fine.

*NOTE: If you try to do this, there are a bunch of fields in two tables that have been renamed in Kunena 6.x:

categories:

parent_id >> parentid
pub_access >> pubAccess
pub_recurse >> pubRecurse
admin_access >> adminAccess
admin_recurse >> adminRecurse
allow_anonymous >> allowAnonymous
post_anonymous >> postAnonymous
allow_polls >> allowPolls
topic_ordering >> topicOrdering
allow_ratings >> allowRatings

ranks:

rank_id >> rankId
rank_title >> rankTitle
rank_min >> rankMin
rank_special >> rankSpecial
rank_image >> rankImage

If you don't rename the fields in your sql imports, then you'll just get errors.