Holy cow! What was wrong with the site?
It's kind of a story, but it had to do with how much space the forum attachments were using and where they were stored. The hosting company has a 1Gb limit for the database that stores forum info. The attachments were being stored in the database which had grown to 1.9 Gb. The fix should have been easy but the company hosting the site wouldn't even allow temporary access to make the change. Unfortunately we might have lost some attachments from the week or two before the forum stopped working.

i was starting to worry that you were going to pull a monodax on us
Not happening. I dedicated this entire weekend to solving this issue, and already had a backup plan in place if it didn't work. This stuff isn't part of my day job so when the site stopped working I had to do a bunch of learning, fast. Sorry it took so long. Didn't mean to scare anyone.