Sorry folks, I would have fixed this sonner except I have been rather unwell, I was sleeping at the time Dave contacted me.
It wasnt quite that simple, HG were careful to prevent dave from fixing the problem, they also set the extended immutable and archive attributes after changing the permissions.
I have brought the forums back online, they have NO excuse for this kind of behaviour, let alone the wait in the queue to get it re-enabled.
Here is what they did:
992 2015-11-05 12:50:12 cd ~path/obscured
993 2015-11-05 12:50:13 chmod 0 .
994 2015-11-05 12:50:16 chattr +ia .
995 2015-11-05 12:50:23 ll
996 2015-11-05 12:50:26 chattr -ia .
997 2015-11-05 12:50:30 chmod 0750 .
998 2015-11-05 12:50:33 chmod 0 forum
999 2015-11-05 12:50:36 chattr +ia forum/
Here is my criticisim of these actions:
1) They failed to do it right the first time, they took the entire website down, how unprofessional!
2) They not only made it unreadable, they set the extended attributes so that dave could not fix it.
2) This IMO is damaging a server and I would very quickly move my services away from them, all trust gone.
Here is what I did to bring it back online...
1020 2015-11-05 20:33:18 chattr -ia forum/
1021 2015-11-05 20:33:21 chmod 740 forum/
Really HG... you have to wait for this?