mcgrue: Saturday night I was running into php errors on something I was trying to install on the same server as verge-rpg.com. The errors were obscure and nonsensical, so I figured it was time to try a php upgrade. A long story short: a dependency chain basically bit me in the ass, and our mysqld became... somehow uninstalled (why uninstalling Exim would do this, I don't know. Le sigh.)
By 8 AM sunday morning I'd reinstated a mysqld on vrpg's server, but it was now mysql 5 instead of mysql 4. There were some underlying sql syntax changes. And by this point I was exhausted and continued to be too tired to work on it after work.
So I brought in the canadian cavalry...
Overkill: When we updated to MySQL 5, vrpg's website codebase had lots of magical error messages involving operator precedences of joins vs comma operators. It, of course, had misleading error reports too, so then it lead me to think the error was happening in a completely different file than the boards index.
Moral of this story: copy-pasting your error reports is BAD! Everything should be normal again now though.
mcgrue: I think there are a few more morals than that here, but... yeah. Anyways: the site is back up!