Apparently something odd happened somewhere along the way earlier tonight because, as anyone who tried to access the forum during that time knows, there was an error with the forum's messages table (probably our most important table because it's where all the posts are stored). I tried using our host's PHPMyAdmin's "Repair" feature to fix the table as soon as I found out there was a problem soon after 9pm ET, but the database wasn't having any of it. And after I tried two more times without any luck (all three times PHPMyAdmin gave me an error that the MySQL server "has gone away," which is actually an odd way of telling me the repair process had timed out) I was really beginning to get worried. If the table couldn't be repaired, that would mean a backup would have to be used to replace it - but the last backup I'd done was several days ago, so we would have lost all the posts between the time of the backup and whatever happened happened. Plus, because the messages table is HUGE, it would have taken me hours to recreate it from the backup. But thankfully the fourth time was the charm and that attempted repair went through.
Everything looks fine. But along the way if anyone notices that any posts seem to be missing or anything about any posts seems off, please post about it here in this topic and I'll look into it.
Now I'm off to make a new backup just so everything will be as up to date as possible should something else unforeseen happen...