We just installed the latest update and are having problems not being able to see the message.

See this: Link that shows problem

It seemed like some kind of permissions problem but that did not seem to be a way to solve it.

Any ideas?

Anyone???

According to what you have for your general forum description is a couple of problems. Guests can't see the topics.
And I assume a problem with threaded vs flat mode.
For the guest issue I would check
Control Panel » Group Management » Forum Permissions
For guests.
There are two settings "can see forum" that looks like it is okay. But it should have a value of 1 for each forum you want enabled for guests.
The second setting to the right "Can read topics"
Should have a value of 1 for each forum you want them to see.

They were all set correctly and the messages are still NOT coming up.

Could there be some problem in the database?

If you are logged in, it will let you switch modes and THEN most of the time it will correct itself and the messages show up.

So far all the mods can see the messages but a number of users cannot.

A couple of people have said that they have tried switching modes a few times and have still not been able to see the message but most people have said that this seems to have fixed the problem.

Basically if you are a guest, it is locking the messages away from your view and does NOT pay attention to the forum permissions settings.

Well as a guest I can see the forum summary, I can see the forum topic headers. But when i select a thread I get the same thing no thread.
I registered as rer.
I assume the default group is USER.
Now it looks like the board is closed to the USER group because I get the message that there are no forums to view.
If I log out I am back to what I saw before. So I think it is a permissions issue.
I see two options. Completely go through every setting for forums and groups.
You could just pick one forum and one group. Check what group I am a member of.
Or open a support ticket to fix the problem.
I am not sure what you upgraded from but I have seen issues with upgrading from threads 6 to 7 where most everyone is imported as a moderator instead of a user. I think Rick has a simple query to fix that issue without loosing the real moderators.

I've stayed relatively up to date. We had 7.4 installed before this.

My other admin guy is working on the site, so he might be testing out the permissions.

Read my private message I sent you.

I'm the tech guy. I've been looking at the DB. I have a couple standard permission users. I got one to change from no post bodies to showing the post bodies by doing the switch back and forth in my preferences from and to threaded posts. Then I had another normal user that was not showing posts. I compared them. I found that by putting default values of 'english' in user_language and 'side' in user_post_layout for the user that was having problems, it fixed it. I updated users that had these values as nulls. However, that hasn't seemed to fix the guest account when I do it to user 1.
I've checked permissions carefully. They don't seem to be the problem.
I'll be staring to debug next.
This was a standard upgrade to 7.4 done the same way I've done others.

It really looks like permission settings are causing the problem. another example is if I select active topics I get a error"Database error only visible to forum administrators"

Of course that permission issue could be caused by a corrupted table.
Not sure if you want to start over with a upgrade but If you are sure all of your permissions are set correctly then the best bet is to open a support ticket.

Things are starting to look better. I can see topics and threads now.

Currently Guest have the old problem but You may not have been through all the permissions yet.

Permissions?