Upgrade from 1.5.4 to Latest (1.7.4)

Question

I am running into this error while attempting to upgrade from 1.5.4 to 1.7.4:

Question2Answer was unable to perform the installation query below. Please check the user in the config file has CREATE and ALTER permissions:

SHOW COLUMNS FROM qa_messages

Error 1146: Table 'talk.qa_messages' doesn't exist

The databases between these versions appear to be very different and if the upgrade process cannot happen automatically I will need step by step instructions to do so.

I realize there are other posts depicting similar problems but they are either unanswered or the solution does not work.

I have also already tried upgrading incrementally starting with the next available version (1.6.3), but ran into similar problems.

EDIT:

I found a solution that worked for me (to avoid creating an account I will just put it here):

I needed to set 'QA_EXTERNAL_USERS' to true in qa-config.php. This allowed the upgrade to work without error.

define('QA_EXTERNAL_USERS', true);

Comments

Were you using external users? For example Wordpress integration. It may be there is a clause missing in the upgrade query.