Well, I've been working to fix this for a good few hours now. It started with a "brute force attack" from some b******* based in Turkey at 3.30pm yesterday and I haven't managed to work out exactly what consequential damage was caused. They were clearly trying to hack into the MRC forum admin account by trying 1000's of random user/password attempts every minute. I don't think they succeeded, but their action caused a massive overload of the server we use to host the forum for several hours and, I think, caused some forum data corruption, which is why we were seeing errors and things were not working as they should.
I have blocked the Turkish IP address, but that's probably a case of, "locking the stable door after the horse has bolted!"
I've taken some backups to ensure our data is OK and taken some other blocking actions. The server overload that was causing the forum to behave erratically seems to have settled, but I can't be sure until I check the logs tomorrow after a few hours of operation.
The good news is that the forum does seems to be "UP" now, and 99% working, but I've had to remove the "Recents" option as it proved to be incompatible with the latest version of the forum software we are running.
The only other damage I have been able to spot is that trying to load the last page of this topic will cause an error: http://mazdarotaryclub.com/forum/index.php?topic=85272.0
IF YOU SPOT ANYTHING ELSE NOT WORKING AS IT SHOULD, PLEASE REPORT IT HERE - THANKS
See if you can spot when the Turkish b****** started to try and hack into our forum from the top "CPU Usage graph" :angryfire: