In any event, that change seems to have made it function.

It's entirely possible I botched something along the way?

Sorry for the late reply, by the way - apparently my ISP's spam filtering wasn't catching these emails, but my local Outlook was, which is very unexpected (as I don't check the local spam folder very frequently at all).

It was getting hung up on my username and password, I believe - I have them as part of my bookmark URL and the new config file didn't have them, initially. I added them to the config and it didn't like that. I took them out of both and things seem to be in good order.

Hmm, that is weird.

Do you mean that you had something like https://selfoss.example.com/?user=davimack&password=CorrectHorseBatteryStaple as the bookmark? Or was there some other path? When I try this on my server, I just get redirected to /sign/in

Do you have selfoss installed in a subdirectory rather than a subdomain? That is not as well tested so I might have introduced a bug.

Could you please share your config (with sensitive fields censored), the precise version of selfoss and the web server?

It was getting hung up on my username and password, I believe - I have them as part of my bookmark URL and the new config file didn't have them, initially. I added them to the config and it didn't like that. I took them out of both and things seem to be in good order.

I unfortunately didn't keep the F12 window open, so can't say definitively what was happening, though.

Thank you for your helpful suggestion!

Selfoss stopped working, so I figured it was time to upgrade. I'd been on 2.17. I followed the steps, and got a 403. So I blew away the whole thing** and got "selfoss is still loading, please wait." So I downloaded the latest build, repeated the process, same story. This is the fully out of the box, not my data directory, install.

Any ideas on how to troubleshoot, please?

Since you are stuck on the middle error of client bootstrap, it sounds like something is wrong with the JavaScript file the server returned but the browser does not think the file failed to load.

Because it is just a static file, possibly something is misconfigured on the web server.

For troubleshooting, you can try the following:

1. Open the web browser’s development tools (usually F12 key)
2. Navigate to your selfoss instance.
3. In the Console tab of devtools, check if there are any errors.
4. In the Network tab of devtools, verify that there is a GET request to a URI like https://your.selfoss.website/index.60251538.js (the number might be different). It should look something like the following:
5. Open the URL, the content of the file should be the same as the contents of the file of the same name in /selfoss/public directory in the zip file.

If you use Apache, you will need to enable .htaccess and mod_rewrite, which is what typically redirects the requests to the public directory. Oops, looks like the requirements are not anywhere near the README.

My hosted website had been referencing PHP 7.2.34, which I just updated to 8.*

*(by changing an A record in DNS, so it's not like I'm really in control of this)

I do not see how changing a DNS record affects PHP version other than changing it to a server with a different version installed.

Selfoss stopped working, so I figured it was time to upgrade. I'd been on 2.17. I followed the steps, and got a 403. So I blew away the whole thing** and got "selfoss is still loading, please wait." So I downloaded the latest build, repeated the process, same story. This is the fully out of the box, not my data directory, install.

Any ideas on how to troubleshoot, please?

*(by changing an A record in DNS, so it's not like I'm really in control of this)
**(I saved my data directory of course)