Why was the forum offline this morning? Well it was my fault because I wasn't monitoring a table in the database as closely as I should have been and it started straining the resources of our host. It was mostly my fault because of falling behind monitoring the table and not emptying the contents when it was getting too big. But the reason it gets too big is because of how we had to switch hosting plans a year ago (because our host was no longer going to be supporting the plan we had) and a couple of issues with the way the forum's scripts are written causes problems with the version of PHP that our host now uses. Those problems will go away once we upgrade the forum's system from SMF 2.0 to 2.1. However, SMF has yet to release a final, perfected 2.1. Back on October 15th they did release a greatly improved, close to final version, but they advise that it should only be used for testing and not on an up and running Web site like the forum. So, until SMF gets all the kinks worked out, I won't be upgrading. But what I definitely need to do is not forget about keeping a close eye on the size of that table in the database...
