My appologies for the site being down for the past week. Here is the skinny on what happened and why it was so difficult to fix the problem.
1. the site was hacked because the forum wasn't updated with the latest version
2. to prevent further damage I removed the forum from the server
3. I got my web host provider to recover the old database from a previous backup
4. here's the problem. NOw there is no program to interface with the database
5. I tried to install a new forum and then recover the database.
6. since the database is larger than 2MB the php has a time out feature so it can't upload the entire file
7. I tried using a "bigdump" program to dump the database in a SQL file and then it uploads it in small chunks but failed miserably
8. It was no problem to get a new forum up and running but if I couldn't recover all our posts and user names etc it wasn't worth the effort
9. finally I've recovered a backup from a week ago so we've lost minimal information and I"m updating the forum as we speak. Hopefully all will go smoothly.
To make matters worse, my support team at my web host had a two day response time on support emails so it was a painfull process to get back and forth answer question going. Finally I was able to recover most of the information.
again, sorry for the inconvenience but I tried my best to get the forum back up and running as soon as possible with minimal information loss
Cheers.