Washerhelp

Not at all. Regular social butterfly that I am

It is indeed. Go to System->Settings->Login & Registration->Registration and change "Allow new registrations" to no

Glad to hear you have a resolution in any case there

I feel you may be missing what I mean here. By very definition, guests cannot have unread content. As they are not members

Remember.... that could also be multiple pages.  
If you have a crawler for example hit 500 different pages each with the same title of "Sorry", it's going to sum it up as one "page". 

I did a quick search on Google there looks to be ways of getting URLs from GA. You might want to search this more.  We can’t help with that here obviously but that hopefully points you in a better direction. 
 
 

The only thing that setting will do is change the JSON-LD data to say the site's root is not your forum itself.  It helps Google know that www.domain.com/forum is not the "root" of the site.  
To learn more about what JSON-LD is, check out:
https://moz.com/blog/json-ld-for-beginners
But I don't think it's going to be relevant to what you are wanting to do.  

You would need to have something that redirects old links.  The software itself does not have a tool to change any old posted content to reflect any links posted by users, etc.  
It WOULD fix all new links and the links generated by the software itself automatically.  But it would not fix old articles, etc.  

Its indeed not really relevant to what you are asking there.
Redirection from one domain to another shouldnt actually be that big a task by the way. If you ask your hosting company, thats something they are likely to be able to do for you quite easily

Yes, when you're done, your forums will have the same URL they do now.

If your physical folder was “/forums/”, I think you are lucky, because that will also be the default forums folder once you make Pages the default app. So, everything in the forums should continue to work as always. 

This is correct... a step that I had forgotten.  This should be done immediately after you complete step 2.
$INFO['board_url'] = 'https://mysite.co.uk/forums'; to
$INFO['board_url'] = 'https://mysite.co.uk/';

I believe you’ll also need to update your conf_global.php to reflect the change there as well to the board URL. 

What you want to do is
1. Activate Pages and build your initial basic home page. This will put the url at something like mysite.co.uk/forums/articles(or)pages.  Stay at this step until you're happy with what appears when you visit this URL. It will be your new homepage.  Probably buy one of @opentype's excellent article and page template plug-ins if you intend to write articles.
2. Go into your file manager and move your entire IPS install + all subfolders down to the root folder for your domain (remove wordpress first!!!). This means everyting currently in your public_html/mysite.co.uk/forums/ folder needs to go to public_html/mysite.co.uk/
3. Log into your IPS ACP and set Pages as the default app. Pages will now reside at mysite.co.uk, and your forums will reside at mysite.co.uk/forums.

 
4. Celebrate

I will do Marc, was assuming my server  is running on php 8, which is set in my hosting company dashboard and didn't realise Cron jobs weren't run from my actual website. Hence my puzzlement. I'll check with them.

The IPB software is reporting the path it is using to PHP.  It does not know and is not told by PHP what path to use for the CLI.  Unfortunately this is caused by the way your hosting provider is setting up PHP on their servers.  

I thought do, it's just someone earlier said it wouldn't. Maybe I misunderstood. Anyway many thanks. 

If the cron jobs aren't working, the software will notice that after a period of time, and trigger that red warning in the ACP that the tasks aren't running.

What you quoted for an error... doesn't look familiar, actually. Or doesn't look like the output which cPanel sent me in the past when I was diagnosing a problem on my site.
You may need to ask your Host about that, and have them check whether the cron is actually working.
You should be able to run the job from command-line (SSH), as shown in the ACP. If no output is produced, that normally means the command worked.

The notifications you mention may have been sent by cPanel/WHM (if you use that). The cPanel GUI cron editor has an option to email you all errors. I've used it once or twice for diagnostics.
And that red warning you saw in the ACP happens if the tasks aren't running often enough. The software checks that via a system task, it just can't check that the cron job itself is running on the server level.

Hi. That's not what I meant. I meant when you get a message on dashboard or by email saying you should change to PHP8, there's no mention that if you do, you need to also manually update the Cron syntax on your server. 

Thankyou @Jim M, I've found an old third party app that was causing the blank screen. I don't know what to do now because it is an app we use as main management for our community, but at least I know where the problem cames from...
@Washerhelp thankyou but I already know you need to type the right PHP path into your cron task from your hosting management panel. My problem did not come from there. But regarding what you say, when you check "cron task" in the community settings it tells you what you need to type, including the path, you only need to make a "copy paste" and job's done ! 😉 
And beware for the others, the PHP path is not always the same, it depends on your hosting installation, you need to refer to the ACP path to type the right one !
 
Thankyou all for your advices, now at least I know where my problems came from.

I got in touch with my hosting tech support as suggested. I had no idea that when you set your website to run on PHP 8 that the Cron jobs don't change and have to be told to use PHP 8 "manually".
This seems crazy, but if it is the case, it would be great if Invision told us this when advising us to change to PHP 8? If this information is  made clear, then my bad - and please accept apologies 🙂
They changed the Cron from -
php -d memory_limit=-1 -d max_execution_time=0 /home/customer/www/washerhelp.co.uk/public_html/forums/applications/core/interface/task/task.php cd0e5a90ec46904f51980f7f8bd36132 To
php80 -d memory_limit=-1 -d max_execution_time=0 /home/customer/www/washerhelp.co.uk/public_html/forums/applications/core/interface/task/task.php cd0e5a90ec46904f51980f7f8bd36132 Hopefully that will wok OK. But 2 queries arose from the investigation. First, the permissions on task.php are set at 777? (not me) and second, what is the strange set of numbers and letters at the end of the Cron syntax and does it need deleting cd0e5a90ec46904f51980f7f8bd36132 ?
I got the syntax initially from somewhere at Invision
 
 
 

EDIT:  Nevermind I see the path, had to scroll

Glad to hear you got this sorted. Keep in mind, when running CRON, this is a server-side tool, your hosting provider is the best source for the best command to be running.