installaction migration failing

[0xstride]

hey community - would appreciate you help with an installation issue, which appears to be similar symptom to this historical ticket #671

context

• laravel 12
• followed installation instructions here https://spatie.be/docs/laravel-activitylog/v4/installation-and-setup
• when following instructions i did not make any changes to .env, so everything would be defaults
• local dev (.env using pgsql as db_connection)
• forge server (.env using mysql)
• local development migrations work fine, on the forge server php artisan migrate --force generated the following error

  SQLSTATE[42000]: Syntax error or access violation: 1103 Incorrect table name '' (Connection: mysql, SQL: create table `` (`id` bigint unsigned not null auto_increment primary key, `log_name` varchar(255) null, `description` text not null, `subject_type` varchar(255) null, `subject_id` bigint unsigned null, `causer_type` varchar(255) null, `causer_id` bigint unsigned null, `properties` json null, `created_at` timestamp null, `updated_at` timestamp null) default character set utf8mb4 collate 'utf8mb4_unicode_ci')

  at vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Connection.php:823
    819▕                     $this->getName(), $query, $this->prepareBindings($bindings), $e
    820▕                 );
    821▕             }
    822▕ 
  ➜ 823▕             throw new QueryException(
    824▕                 $this->getName(), $query, $this->prepareBindings($bindings), $e
    825▕             );
    826▕         }
    827▕     }

      +8 vendor frames 

on forge server i additionally attempted;

• php artisan config:clear and php artisan migrate --force
• explicitly setting .env to the below and then running php artisan migrate --force
  ACTIVITY_LOGGER_TABLE_NAME=activity_log
  ACTIVITY_LOGGER_DB_CONNECTION=mysql

all the above efforts result in the same error message posted above

thanks for you help