While this lets the forum "come up" - when I try to click on any forum while logged in as BellaOnline, I get Access Denied errors. Luckily if I log in as any normal user I can indeed see the forums, click on things and post. However, the main admin account should be able to see the forums too
I went into the control panel for "administrators" (which BellaOnline is) and it definitely is set to 1 for every single forum as "can see" and "can read". I think it is all related to that cached permissions table, that it can't fill in that table properly for when I am using the account and therefore can't check the permissions on the fly. The actual account seems to be set up properly.
The fields in that table are all text fields so I can't make them "larger". Is it something about the length of the string that's being passed in to SQL, that there is a limit on that?
AHA I take that back!! Oddly in MySQL there IS a variety of sizes on the TEXT field!! I changed that FORUM_PERMISSIONS field to a MEDIUMTEXT type and it works now. So anyone who is dealing with lots of forums may need to make this change.