Hello, I hope you are all well.

In the last few hours, some FreeFlaroom forum users (myself included) have started reporting an issue where their forum is down and they can no longer access it or its control panel.

At first glance, I thought it was just a problem on my forum, but after coming here and sharing my issue with other forum members, it turned out that a large number of users were facing the same problem, and some of them shared valuable information with me.

Here are the details:

On April 26, there was an administrative announcement stating the following:

Sorry for the downtime today! It was caused by a handful of forums going well beyond the resource usage allowed under our Fair Use Policy.

If this affects you: please understand that FreeFlarum is a free service, and it can’t guarantee specific uptime or performance levels. It’s genuinely amazing to see what people have built here - forums with thousands of users and active discussions - and it’s a real testament to how accessible Flarum is as a discussion platform. But there’s a limit to what a free service can sustain, and some forums have hit that limit as of now. So, I’ll be emailing the admins of these sites directly to figure out next steps.

With that said, all forums should be back up, but let me know if you spot anything out of the ordinary (e-mail is better: info(at)freeflarum.com). I am a bit busy lately with other duties, so please bear with me while I sort this out🙏

What does this mean for your forum?

Firstly, this isn’t a technical problem; you haven’t done anything to cause it to malfunction. Also, there’s no widespread issue affecting everyone, according to the forum’s status dashboard.

What happened was that the administration may have introduced changes related to the allowed resource limit for forums.

From this we can deduce the reason behind the forum’s malfunction, which is simply that it exceeded the allowed limit of resources allocated to it.

What can I do?

Currently, the administration is only asking for patience.

A member of the administration may contact you at this time. If the forum outage continues for an extended period, you can contact info(at)freeflarum.com

The response process may take longer as the developer is busy during this period.

The announcement highlighted an important point: the forum is a free service, and given its quality, the resources are no longer sufficient for the number of users.

Therefore, as a regular forum user, I personally believe that making a donation would be a great way to support the forum further.

Download your forum data

I believe you can download a backup copy of your forum through the main control panel.

You will find the download options under the “Account Settings” page, specifically in the “Export Your Data” section:

Good luck