No galleries in the forum.  I use it on one page to display some historical photos.

I checked for a shortcodes option in the forum option content settings and the only thing I could find was the “filter shortcodes” option (which is checked, and there is nothing in the allowed box) – if I’m understanding this option correctly, it should disable shortcodes in forum posts.

It is an odd issue – and I’m still waiting on a response.  At this point I’m almost ready to migrate to a different method for the photos – as I said, I really only use it on one page and I know WordPress has changed how it works with images – I may just opt to use that instead if it works well.

Thanks for the other ideas.

We like and applaud plugins that do not load everything on all page requests but allow the user to specify where they are to be used so code is only loaded where needed. Sadly – so few seem to do this very simple thing.

some folks have had good success using a plugin like the Plugin Organizer (https://wordpress.org/plugins/plugin-organizer/) which allows you to only load plugins on specific pages or other methods…

Thank you for the suggestion on the plugin organizer.  It took me a bit to figure out how it worked – I had actually installed it before but it appeared to be rather difficult to configure, but after I spent a few minutes it is really pretty easy.  I suppressed the gallery from the forum page and both seem to be working fine now.  Since I still have not heard anything back from the plugin author, I think this will be my “fix”.

Thanks again for the superb support.

good news!  glad everything working out now!