UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.threads Version 7/8 Support Database error only visible to forum administrators

Hi all,

I pay for UBB hosting each month and have opened a support ticket. Lately it seems like my support tickets don't ever get a reply or closed.

I'm just wondering if there's a new route I should be going through?

The problem: My forums are at: https://forums.yulelog.com/ -- When I visit this page I see this error message:




I have seen this problem a couple times now; it resolved itself in September of last year after a few hours.

I saw it yesterday and it was again resolved a few hours later. However, logged on today and see it again.

Since I use UBB hosting I don't know if I have any way to troubleshoot this on my side and so I'm reliant on the support ticket system.

Thank you all for the support over the years.

I am assuming that most likely your ubbt_ONLINE is full it is becoming a common issue but it could be anything
But anyway to check correctly you would need to check your error log files if you set them up, if you did you could ftp to your files and check or access cpanel which you should have that.
Then open phpmyadmin and see if the table ubbt_ONLINE is full

Thanks for your reply Ruben!

I used to manage the hosting myself, but I switched over to paying UBB to host my forums as I didn't want to deal with the maintenance and these kind of things. I have been able to revive my forums a few times due to SQL and PHP issues, but currently I don't think I have any ability to debug or troubleshoot on my side; it's all managed hosting so I'm totally dependent on UBB.

I am wondering if there has been a lapse in the UBB Support Desk, as I used to get replies regularly but lately my tickets have just been open without any replies.

Is there any email address I can reach out to to the UBB official team? I am paying each month for the hosting and I paid for a support membership after this most recent outage.

I just want to say I have always had a great experience with the UBB team! Just making sure they're still around and supporting these products. I'm a happy customer in general, just want to get my forums back up for my community.

The only way I know is via support ticket
You could try a pm here to UBBSystems but his last visit was 2025

Thanks again for that information. I won't lie, that is a bit concerning to me. I was told daily backups are made of my forums, but if there is no response from UBB, I don't think I have access to those backups. And obviously in the event of outages I am effectively powerless to get access to my own forum backend.

I'm honestly not sure what my options are at this point, other than hope I hear back from them soon. Do we know of any other way to contact the official UBB team that (I had assumed) manage this website?

My monthly payments are certainly being collected, but if services aren't rendered this becomes a problem. I also paid for a support license recently.

Like I said before, the team has always been responsive and extremely helpful and professional. I think very highly of them. But I did notice a ticket effectively did not get answered in mid to late 2025. And the repeated outages are also concerning.

If there is any other recourse or anyone else on these forums I can contact to find out what's going on, it would be much appreciated.

I am only posting here because I have no idea where else to seek help for my particular issue.

My forums are back up, but I'm not sure why they were down. I can't find any logs that would point me in the right direction.

So the forums were back up yesterday as well but down again today. So I don't know what the best course of action is to perform maintenance while I have access to the admin panel. A little lost.

Thank you for your help thus far though. If there's any basic troubleshooting I could do while the forums are online, I am open to anything!

Update:

I see my referrer log has an insane amount of activity. Not sure what to do about that! I decided to disable the referral log because it seemed to be accumulating a crazy amount of rows without really much benefit. Perhaps that could be the issue? We'll see!

We are 3rd party contractors so unfortunately we cannot really comment on how UBBSystems handles support or services other than to use the support desk or [email protected].

To view the error via FTP one could either view the UBB.threads error log (to view past entries); the path to this file is defined in the UBB.threads Control Panel: CP -> Master Settings -> Primary -> Logging Tab -> Database Log Storage Directory

Or, if configured above, you can view the UBB.threads error log via: CP -> Tools -> Logs -> SQL Error Logs

To view the error live on the site (versus the "Database Error only viewable by Administrators") you'd want to modify /libs/mysqli.inc.php and change
To

The data in the referral log is simply sites that've sent traffic to your forum, it's not really a thing that needs to be enabled if it's a feature you don't use.

Thank you for this information.

Unfortunately my forums continue to go down and then come back up.

I'll keep investigating to see if there's anything in my power to resolve the issue.

Only your host can help you if you do not have a ftp account and or cpanel type access.
I would require both if it was my account.
It appears you do have cpanel at least. if you have the login.Goto phpmyadmin open the data base and check the ubbt_ONLINE table
I will bet the engine is set to memory and the size is like 16 mb
If it is empty the table

Update:

I got in touch with Brooks and he mentioned my online user sessions was flooded by bots.

Do you think this is related to the ubbt_ONLINE table? Sounds like it might be what you mentioned?

Forums are back online currently, so I'll try this.

Read this
https://www.ubbcentral.com/forums/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/266933

Thank you again Ruben for all of your help!

I'm already using Cloudflare, made sense to add bot protection and put the site in "under attack" mode to see if it helps alleviate the bot problem I have. It seems to have significantly helped so far.

I noticed these forums basically use the same kind of protection.