ok.
What caused the site to ‘crash’?
I was working on optimizing the site using a tutorial from http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/the-ultimate-quickstart-guide-to-speeding-up-your-wordpress-site–wp-23846
When I got to the part on using the plugin “WP-DBmanager”, I backed up the database. I then repaired it. When I did the optimize part, that’s when I got the 500 error. I called the hosting company and not sure what they did. Eventually, they did a database restore from a weekly file. The error logs from that restore showed lots of errors. When I finally got the site back, the final result was the topics were there with no forums.
ow !
Hopefully the company have restored the database to back beyond your attempts to optimise it?
If so it should have no errors. So if it has, they probably need to go back to an older version if they have one – many hosters don’t.
Is it just forums entries that are missing???
if so you could try
dashboard>tools>forums>repair forums
and when you do get it going again, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t do stuff to a live site again.
1. a few hours invested in a test site
https://codex.bbpress.org/creating-a-test-site/
and you would not have lost your live site, and
2. REGULARLY back your main site (the above tells you how) and you could have just restored that – hosting companies rarely keep much, and an issue found after a week can be fatal !
Do come back for further help if needed.