I haven't seen anyone post about this, so I am doing so.
This morning I couldn't access the forums. First, it threw an error where my browser couldn't connect to it. Second, the forum appeared to be erased, and it shown a message that would appear as if the forum was created for the first time.
Later, it finally loaded, but oddly I was logged out until I logged back in. No images load, except some cached profile pictures.
And your question is? Everybody had the same experience. Why not wait until there is a message from the forum admin?
The question is "what happened to the forum last night?"
They might be updating the forum? I saw that they added an updates sub-category to the announcements category.
Possibly. But they don't usually reset the forum back to the default Discourse "congratulations, you got a Discourse insurance running" page when they change something about the forum. Maybe an update went wrong?
I just switched mobile browsers to Via browser, so I have no picture cache, but some people's profile pictures load?
And the answer is, the forum admin is updating the forum software, as well as trying to fix the issues that were a result of it.
I know the forum has the option to grab the profile picture from gravatar, so those might just be people using it.
All guessing.
Correct answer. The best way to respond is just being patient.
Welp, that was a real pain.
Normally updates shouldn't be that long / hard. But in this case, it seemed to require moving to an entirely new server / updating the OS.
Fine, easy enough. But then that required waiting for hours for DNS to update. (Maybe I could have avoided this actually, but the setup script wasn't letting proceed...)
But then, the Discourse restore process was very unhappy about the images for some reason. I think I finally got that resolved, so things so re-appear soon enough.
I think they didn't know that...
Also, if the forums ended up just showing a wizard that would be only shown if it is set up for the first time, how would that be just me?
Right, except we're still allowed to be curious as to why the forum we all talk on had a set up wizard at around 12:30 AM (00:30) CST on 5/24/2025, and I don't appreciate the fact that you were acting like us asking is a bad thing.
Well I didn't appreciate the fact that you were swearing on the community, so we all have something to look back on.
How does this have to do with the original topic?
I think we are allowed to be concerned about the forum that we all read. It had seemed that everything was deleted for a while. That is a completely valid reason to be worried.
Going to close this since all the issues are (hopefully) resolved.
It's fine to ask questions and be concerned -- though the original post was only a series of statements. While the question was implicit, it does leave some people to wonder 'what is the point'. But also, it's fine to be patient and just wait. Things happen, and thankfully there are many ways to spend time other than the forum. 