URGENT: Database Data Type Changed Without Warning

I have a Editor Textarea (editorta) field called "cb_aboutme" where users can type a short biography. This field had a character limit of 1500. I've been using this field for over 2 years now, without problems.

In the last 2 weeks, this database field has changed from data type mediumtext to varchar(255) for no obvious reason. I've made no manual database changes whatsoever in these last 2 weeks, and I've made absolutely no changes to this field in the backend in 2 years. ALL instances of this field throughout the ENTIRE database have had this change, so ALL my users' "about me" text has been truncated to 256 characters.

The only changes I've made in recent weeks is installing updated versions of official CB plugins, many of them. But why should those be breaking existing fields which have remained untouched for over 2 years?!?

No idea, the cb.core.xml file determines its type and it's showing mediumtext. All my textarea and textarea editor fields are showing mediumtext in database as well. I think there was a bug in an older CB Core Fields ajax that overrode the types, but that's long sense been fixed with latest. Aside from that something else may have overwrote the field XML or changed it directly in database.

Maybe be more specific as to exactly what you installed and can review their sources.

I'm going through my backups to see when the change occurred, but it's tedious work. Once I figure out exactly when it happened, I'll have a better chance of knowing what I did on that day.

The change occurred yesterday. My backup from July 15th still shows the field as mediumtext and has the full "about me" text. Yesterday I updated the following plugins:

plug_cbconnect-336.zip
bot_cbcoreredirect-100.zip
plug_cbforums-213.zip

I started to configure (but did not finish and did not enable) CB Connect for the first time. I *may* have attempted to match up the cb_aboutme field to one of the Facebook fields, although I don't remember doing so and it's not currently the case.

I configured the CB Forums plugin so it would work with Kunena 2.0, but I did not use the cb_aboutme field in any way during that configuration as far as I can remember.

I also adjusted the ordering of some of the fields by assigning sequential numbers to them instead of the crazy numbers that had built up over the years (-52, -35, -3, 0, 8, 19, etc).

Those were the only changes I did over the last 2 days.

Create a copy of your site then install those plugins 1 by 1 (checking after each install) and seeing if the issue duplicates. I'm not seeing anywhere in their source for them to change fields type (I never programmed them to do so).

Re-ordering the fields is what caused this to happen. In the field manager, I changed all the numbers in the Order column (the column with the save icon at the top) to look like 1, 2, 3, etc instead of -53, -35, 12, etc. When I clicked the Save icon, the about_me database field was changed from mediumtext to varchar(255) and all data in the field was truncated for all users.

In addition:

- cb_dateofbirth was changed from date to varchar(255)
- cb_camerasystem was changed from mediumtext to varchar(255)
- cb_critiquewelcome was changed from tinyint(3) to varchar(255)

It seems like any custom field I've ever created that wasn't varchar(255) got changed to varchar(255) when I saved the ordering.