I've taken over maintenance of a Dolphin site that first launched about one year ago, version 5.6.0005. While doing a backup last week I was freaked out to find high bandwidth usage (almost 4Gb a month) and very high page hits, particularly on guestbook.php. The site serves a small city in the US, and there's a large amount of traffic coming from the UK and Argentina. I noticed massive link spam on users' guestbooks, so I disabled the guestbooks and blocked a few of the offending IP addresses. I am not an expert when it comes to website security and I don't want to keep bothering my hosting provider (unless I really hit a dead end or screw something up) - but I've decided to upgrade the site to the latest version of Dolphin.
I have a couple of questions, for starters:
1. Is there a way to take my site offline while I'm doing the upgrade? A page with a message telling visitors the site is undergoing maintenance, or something similar.
2. It looks like I have to first upgrade to v.6.0.0003, and then do the patches to upgrade to 6.1.4. Correct? I'm going to follow the upgrade instructions on this page: http://www.boonex.com/trac/dolphin/wiki/5.6to6.0
Thanks for any input. Nervous!
