Well, the change you made to change it from varchar(256) to varchar(255) you should instead change it to just "text" (no quotes)
You can just go in to PHPMyAdmin and change that table itself in if your host has it available to you; I think Rick said he updated it for 7.4.
The max execution time is an issue with your host; basically making sure that scripts odnt just run forever; they'd have to update it to something logical, like 60 seconds
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