If you're reading this, I was
successful in restoring the forum to operation.
Last night as I was lying in bed, just as my eyelids were about to shut tight, we had a power outage. As is my routine, I immediately went to my office to check the server to make sure the battery backup had prevented a reboot. But no luck, the server was in the process of restarting when I arrived.
So I waited for it to come back up so I could check the forum and guess what? The database had reverted back to May 2017. WTH! I Googled and Googled and for the life of me could not figure out what was going on. Finally, I decided to restore from backup. The only problem was the last backup was 2 weeks old. Well, I restored, and it took forever due to the fact I only had the database no backup of the site files in the web folder. So I had to manually remove the SMF Social Login package line by line in the code.
But then, guess what? I tried to access another website and the entire database was MISSING instead of being simply rolled back. It was gone! Back to Google. To make a long story short I finally figured out what had happened. There were two version of MySQL installed on the server competing with each other. The old 5.1 version had decided it wanted to return to life, which left the system service for the latest MySQL version unable to start.
Anyway, it's fixed now (I think). I'm going to need a nap today!
