Well THIS is just weird!

[Urtheart]

Seems things have returned. Anyone still have problems try PMing someone.

[Chris]

The database tables are automatically repaired every three hours - I can't repair it from my end. It looks as though our posts database is corrupted however, so it'll have to be restored by either Dreadknux or Bmn in the morning.

Just for the record. That's usually what the IPS Driver Error page means.

[bmn]

Chris, assuming that the MySQL server itself isn't broked, and the server isn't clogged, you should be able to do the repair job through the details I sent a while back.

FTR, the "IPS Driver" (rather, an IPS driver) in question is a class (a framework that you use in the code to do tasks relating to a particular thing) used to translate generic database instructions into code and run them in the appropriate database. To illustrate, imagine IPB using a function such as DB::fetchLatestPosts(). This doesn't distinguish between MySQL, pgSQL, MSSQL etc. Each particular database will have its own "driver" for IPB to make these generic functions work despite the differences in each database server, and in this case it's the MySQL driver that's being used.

As for the error itself, it just means that the driver reported an unrecoverable problem in using the database. The actual error is logged for admin use only, for security reasons, but in the current situation it usually means either the server application is down (which takes out everything on the server that uses a database), or one or more of the tables is corrupted and needs to be repaired. Normally it's the sessions table (which keeps track of who's logged in, this takes out the whole forum); occasionally it's the posts table (and sometimes one or two posts are lost repairing it), sometimes topics, though that's rare.

[Esquire]

So that's why my Topic didn't get posted!

[Ferno]

Oh, good, things are back to normal. For a while there I was thinking "Oh noes, Epic sabotage!!1!" *Phew*