Sorry – can you confirm just what you mean by ‘speech bubble’? Are you referring to the forum admin menu ‘Forums’ section? And if so are you saying that this is the inly section you can not access? Also 0- if so – what happens when you click on one of the sections?

I used to be able to click on these for admin options:

http://i.imgur.com/HYP0Vb8.jpg

Ah – the forum tools.

When they disappear it is virtually always down to a script conflict causing jQuery to stop functioning. And script conflicts are most usually caused by a theme or plugin not using the WordPress A{PI correctly. This is described in this FAQ: https://simple-press.com/documentation/codex/faq/troubleshooting/what-is-this-jquery-conflict/

If you know how to use the web console to look for errors then that will tell you if there are any. If you do not know then you could give us a link to your forum page and we could see of anything is obvious.

But, of course, if this used to work and now does not the real question is – what has changed? WP theme? New plugin in use? Etc?

Ahhh I hired a guy to speed up loading times and he installed the “Scripts-To-Footer” plugin. I deactivated that and it works again. Thanks very much for pointing me in the right direction!

Odd why that would do it.

You can load the forum scripts in the footer with the option in the forum Integration > page and permalink admin panel