Hey GrahamY,

I meant to make a comment on this post earlier.

I used to build websites, but I never went as far as building them for others, but I was more-or-less good enough to do so if I wanted.
it's been quite a few years and I'm a bit rusty.

I think Foxy's probably right, that it is likely to do with code-of-conduct for the forums comments, if it's intermittent, on some threads but not others.

Not really much you can do unless you want to spend all your time censoring comments unfortunately, you'll run into the same issues as Mumbrella did spending too much time dealing with comments rather than focusing on content / building the site up in other ways.

You could rebuild and update the site, try to draw in more members and look for more income from donations / or even membership.

I myself have felt guilty for not contributing something financially towards this site, as I know it takes time and expense to manage, and the site has been a good place for me to have my 2 cents worth and gauge what others think about things.
I think it kind of grounded me a little.

I used to build websites with a content management system called Joomla.
When I started learning around 2010 it was version 1.5 now its up to version 3.9 soon to be Joomla 4 I believe.
http://www.joomla.org/
It's free open source software, but to really get the benefits you want to buy an aftermarket template.
I used to used Rocketthemes, they have an install package that includes both their template and the Joomla Content Management System in 1.
It takes about 5 minutes to go into C-Panel, create a mysql database configure it right and upload the zip-file to the host server and unpack it.
(provided the technical specs of the host are compatible with joomla)
from there, you'll have an entire website with all the pages installed just like this one for around US$34
http://demo.rockettheme.com/joomla-templates/phoenix/
And you'll get support from rockettheme too.

[Cont.]
Once you purchase a template, you'll also get access to discounted hosting offers as all the web design companies promote each other.
You'll notice on this page you can get a 25% hosting discount.
http://rockettheme.com/promotions
http://www.rochen.com/joomla-hosting/compare-plans/

Hosting for a single site shouldn't cost you more than $100 - $150 yr, I wouldn't think.

Next you'll need a forum extension to add forum functionality to your site.
http://www.joomdev.com/blog/entry/best-forum-joomla-extensions

Here's a few demos, they're both free.
http://www.chronoengine.com/forums
http://www.kunena.org/forum/163-Feature-Playground

The Joomla Extensions Directory is where you'll find other extensions that will add functionality to your site.

Once you get the forum in you'll need to make some small coding changes CSS to make the forum look and fit the template you added it to.
http://www.w3schools.com/css/

Or you could just ask someone at Rockettheme to help you.

After that I think you should invest in crypto, but its risky.
- You could turn your $1800 per year into ten times as much.

Cryptocurrency is now matured to the point you can just put your cryto into a bank and earn massive interest on it with less risk, its all a part of DeFi, (Decentralised Finance)
http://nakamoto.com/beginners-guide-to-defi/

EU just approved cryptocurrency and the Chinese yuan has gone digital.
The worlds changing.

Look at this for an example:

http://www.binance.com/en/trade/LINK_BUSD?layout=pro
Click the 1 hour increment.

Chainlink is in the top 10 cryptcurrencies.
Currently number 8 with a market cap of 3.85 billion.
http://www.coingecko.com/en

It dropped to $7.30 last week and has already bounced back to $11.
That's a 50% gain in a week for one of the top 10 cryptocurrencies.

You can buy 10x on margin.
If you invested 10k last week on a 10X margin,
i.e bet 100K on the bounce, you'd have made 50K in a week.

There's nearly 6000 coins now, many are rubbish but many will go up 100X

What's more, Binance don't charge you $20 or $30 for a buy / sell
It costs nearly nothing to trade small amounts on binance.

All you gotta do is watch crypto videos on youtube to start to understand things but it takes a bit, especially if your not really computer savvy.
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMtJYS0PrtiUwlk6zjGDEMA

There's no reason why you couldn't create a new site,

- A duplicate of this site all upgraded with added functionality for new members,
- And still leave this old site up for the article archive and for existing members who are happy with the way things are here and don't really care for change.

You may have to back-up and move this website to a different domain though maybe oloarchive.com.au or something so you can free up the onlineopinion.com.au domain for the new site.

In the meantime, you could build and test the new site on another temporary domain, say onlineopinion2.com.au or something and then move that site and discard the domain after you've tested it all and are happy it works properly.

Feel free to respond or contact me via email if you need any pointers setting it up.
I am rusty but I still have a fairly basic understanding of what to do, if this is something you want to do.

I'll even make a donation to pay for the template, if you want.