MyBB Community Forums

I did two things:

1)  I doubt this would matter, but
update din .htaccess inside myforum.com/forums

# Google SEO workaround for search.php highlights:
# Make this rule the first rewrite rule in your .htaccess!
RewriteRule ^([^&]*)&(.*)$ https://myforum.com/forums/$1?$2 [L,QSA,R=301]

to this
# Google SEO workaround for search.php highlights:
# Make this rule the first rewrite rule in your .htaccess!
RewriteRule ^([^&]*)&(.*)$ https://www.myforum.com/forums/$1?$2 [L,QSA,R=301]

(added the www at the suggestion of the admin CP).


2)  
Pursuant to this error message:
For full 4-Byte UTF-8 support you need to change $config['database']['encoding'] = 'utf8'; to $config['database']['encoding'] = 'utf8mb4';in your inc/config.php.

I did change that too.

I suspect that the changing the encoding to utf8mb4 is what created the crashing server wide.

And now no site on my server will load whatsoever.  I get errors ranging from server not responding 522 to SSL handshake error 525.

Is your SSL certificate valid for www.myforum.com ?

I am not sure what was going on, but the sites resumed loading by themselves about an hour later.

I left both settings intact, both the adding of the www to the .htaccess and the switch from utf8 to utf8mb4 in config.php