Jim M

That looks to simply be how your browser (or the app there) is encoding those characters. That is not a software issue per say, I’m afraid.
 

Do you by chance have Pages modules disabled in ACP -> System -> Applications?

It will recount and re-assign achievements based on past content/data. It will not reset your members achievements back to 0 and make them start all over again with future content.

Thank you for confirming. I have transferred this to a ticket for further review, please watch your email for further correspondence. 

As mentioned, this is a bug. If you delete a forum and specify to move children, it should move topics. If you outright delete a forum and specify to delete its children, it should delete them too. It should not just orphan the topics.

It's not that we can't do anything but rather putting your best foot forward. Blocking and processing this at the software level would take valuable resources away from your server for a userbase you may not be serving/catering to. If you have no reason to cater to Russian traffic, why not block it at the network level and not even have them reach your server?
With regards to spam in general, there are pretty heavy spam attacks going on right now. The suggestions if you are experiencing this in countries you do cater to would be to:
Switch to hCAPTCHA, if you're not already using it and ensure you configure hCAPTCHA's "Passing Threshold" to "Difficult" Ensure you have capable Question/Answer Challenges in place that are not easy for a bot/human to pass but are easy for your audience to pass. Ensure you do mark any spammers which do get through with the "Flag as Spammer" functionality. This will tell our Spam Defense system that this is a spammer and you can use that functionality to automatically hide or delete their content if you choose to. If you do want to block IP addresses in the software from registering/logging in, you can do this in ACP -> Members -> Ban Filters. However, it is highly more efficient to do this at the server/network level. Keep in mind that the Spam Defense system is a learning system and any Spam Prevention plan is not 100% effective. If you are being hit by a new spam attack, unfortunately, there is little we can do about that. However, the above should hopefully put up a good barrier that will slow them down.
There are improvements to spam prevention which are being talked about internally as we do acknowledge there is a lot going on as of late but it is not just our software which has noticed this.
 

Please ensure that the forum is of type "Discussion" and not category.
Yes, the secondary group having just the forum you want ABC to see will work.

This is currently not a function to mail to or export specifically club members at this time. You can certainly suggest this in our Feedback forum.

You have Ezoic injecting many ads onto your page from what I can tell when visiting the upgrader. I would suggest temporarily disabling that as if an ad is creating a Javascript error or causing some sort of other disruption this can impact other Javascript on the page.

It's only in the conf_global.php file.

These are just individuals attempting to access things which do not exist. 
I am not having any issue accessing your community so this sounds like something local to your computer having issues accessing. Have you tried a different browser?

This is our firewall which should not block you simply for performing an upgrade. Was there anything which you were doing prior?
Please note I completed the upgrade for you.

This would need to be done on our end. We have received your request and will accomplish it as soon as we can. Please note that it is the weekend so requests may be slower than normal business hours.

Try to reload the upgrader by going to /admin/upgrade 

This will be looked into further in the ticket on our end. Please watch your email for more 🙂 .

Is that a Pages page? If so, you would want to set that page as the default page for the folder in ACP > Pages > Pages. Then finally, set Pages as your default application 

You can try recovery mode (link below) to see if that helps you disable it and uninstall but if you are at the upgrade step, you may need to restore files and uninstall that application or upgrade it to a compatible version.
 

Looked at a few forums and most have a requirement of 1 post to create content. Any users who do not have that content count would be denied the ability to create topics or reply to a topic.

This looks like an issue with one of your third party applications/plugins. When I disable all of those, I am getting a Post Before Registration screen which is correct per your settings.

Here's some information on using the language system to change the words of almost everything: 
 

Disable all third party applications/plugins and try again. Check your custom profile fields for any custom validation.

You set our Platform app as your default application which does not have a default page and cannot be set as such. I changed this back to the Forums app in ACP -> System -> Application -> click the star icon next to the app you want as default.

The Test URL would be able to utilize the Marketplace. However, as it is behind a .htaccess, you would need to temporarily remove that to allow our servers connect to yours to verify the install.

The client was not on a plan with Live Topics. Neither are yourself, I'm afriad.

If the database has categories and you only want to delete 1 category, you can use the move/delete option when managing categories. Otherwise, if you want to delete all records form it, just delete the database 🙂 .