comes up blank page
And it seems that I misread the OP. It was the Author Info page that was blank. My brain saw "bug report" page. Mea Culpa. Mea Maxima Culpa.
Readerinfo.net (which I don't believe is part of this website) seems to be down.
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare str_starts_with() in /home/u175477p213285/domains/readerinfo.net/public_html/base.php on line 52
Upgraded to the latest PHP for another site. I didn't realize this was for all sites hosted in the same package so I didn't check. You learn something new every day.
ReaderInfo is up again.
Like you I was bitten defining a function which later was introduced by PHP, since then I kicked the bad WordPress naming habits and follow the relevant PSR and PRE, all my helper functions are defined using camelCase...
By the way, WordPress 6.5 support for 8.x is still tagged as beta and/or with noted incompatibilities. While Symfony 7.1 and Laravel 11 requires at least 8.2 and Drupal 8.1...
Add to that the extensions issues and Oracle mismanagement of MySQL and managed PHP hosting has becomes either pricey or an unmitigated mess with most hosting providers...
If you reverted to a previous PHP version, consider replacing your str_starts_with() code with a correct polyfill accounting for the numerous edge case of the new PHP version, then test...
This one look like a good one:
https://github.com/symfony/polyfill-php80/tree/1.x
@Gauthier
It wasn't only the str_* functions. I knew about those and had already comments in my code to remove them with a PHP upgrade.
The problem was mainly that I thought I only upgraded PHP for another site in my hosting package. That site doesn't use MySql so I switched that off in the options. Since ReaderInfo generates the pages using a MySql database that went down. Switching that back on and flagging the str_* functions solved it all. ReaderInfo is a pretty simple site.