[@gbbgadmin Participant 9 years, 11 months ago]

RESOLVED: before we had time to try the wireshark tools we ran a script on the database looking for broken relationships. Found that a post that had been removed using correct tools somehow had broken a relationship and the replies page would not load. Here is what happened:

1. A member joined our forum and spammed the crud out of it.
2. Akismet caught the spam and blocked it all, marking all topics and posts as “spam”.
3. One of our keymasters marked the user as a “spammer” according to the moderation tools provided by bbPress.
4. One of our admin staff moved the spam topics and posts to the trash, using the tools on the WordPress admin.
5. The same admin staff emptied the trash using the tools on the WordPress admin.

After this, they did not notice the replies page was not working or that people could no longer post. Later when people reported they could no longer post, our admin went to the WordPress admin and got a 503 error on the “replies” page. We fought this 503 error issue for nearly 1 week. After finding one broken relationship between a topic and the replies in that topic, we fixed the relationships and the 503 error went away. Now, all the forum is working perfectly.

So, somehow, using all the tools provided by bbPress, a user was marked as a spammer, their spam was blocked, trashed and emptied. And then the entire forum was broken due to a broken relationship. Fixed now, but really strange it could happen in the first place.