The problem that if I try to delete a user including all the posts, the forum freezes.
I just restarted the server and the forum came up again. Sorry for the inconvenience and the quick reboot...

I'd argue the contrary. Senderman is one of the original site owners, who generally only step in when something the staff can't handle happens. The weird spam links today seem like a side-effect of the things they're trying in order to fix yesterday's spam problem. Php is hard, yo.

@53, just stop. You make a bigger ass of yourself the more you post. IF you think you have something to prove, then you're likely not proving what you think you are. I speak from experience.

I'm pretty sure they're doing a whole lot of nothing because they just don't care. And why should they? Every time they do something they always get toxicity and negativity from everyone. It's not just a minority getting annoyed because the admins/mods don't bend to their will, it's pretty much a collective negativity from every active member of the forum except maybe a nano-fraction. If I were a mod I certainly wouldn't be all that interested in helping this community when it obviously has a double standard where it wants the mods to do something but when the mods do that something it's never enough or never what the community wants so the community goes "welp, time to bash the mods/admins some more". I'm pretty sure that when it comes to admins/mods, this community has to be the most intolerant one I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of toxic communities.

I feel like no one here really understands how the forum works, at a technical level, and that isn't helping at all. I mean, if you run a delete command it shouldn't cause the forum to freeze, and yet here we are. How on earth is a collecctive shrug acceptable?

These are guest accounts i think. Maybe they were enabled by accident while fixing the duplicate topic bug?

@61, I wouldn't concern with layout changes. If people don't like the new layout, that's on them, though the layout of a new forum can be made to mimick some of this forum's layout pretty easily. Just not all of it without some in-depth HTML modifications. The transition can be made smoother by mimicking categories and maybe porting topics and user accounts though.
Edit: @61, I PM'd you.

Tried to quote reply to you as a guest and it seems to be working as expected... Fingers crossed.

@56, well ok then. If you're going to attack your way into making your point, that's fine by me.
@67, yes, that N-word guy is truly crossing the line. Not cool at all, what guest posters can do. Enough to make me believe the people who think this place is trash. And by the way, I do not think that—yet, it just needs a lot of improvement, is all.

The topics error out when you try clicking them now.
@63, that explains why I noticed you were able to view profiles without being logged in.

All the topics posted by guests have been deleted, and I added a hotfix to the forum's codebase that prohibits guest posting at the software level.

The reason for this "people who aren't logged in can post" mess is unbeknownst to me but is quite concerning and under active investigation. The slowness you've been seeing lately has been caused by a distributed denial of service attack.
In short, someone (likely multiple people - scriptkiddies) are f**king with us in a way that I would have found laughable and kind of impressive in my more reckless days. Being on the other end now, I feel equipped to realize what is going on and put a stop to it.

Camlorn is correct here. CloudFlare has those settings. Might turn them up for now. They also have CloudFlare turnstiles which I recommended a few weeks ago. They're very accessible.