I did some googling of the error message one of the last times it went down.

The error that comes up (exceding max_somethingorather) is apparently common to phpbb boards and it's a MySQL setting that can be changed either by the provider or the user, depending how the provider has things set up. It's basically a limit on how many requests can be pulled out of the database in a certain timeframe. Each reload or thread view generates several hundred requests, and I think adding the extra smileys may have been what tipped the scales. Then again we've also had moderately more traffic here in the last few months, so that could be it too.

IIRC ours is set at 10k and changing it to 50k should make it near bulletproof for the ammount of traffic we have. I think I remember reading that the limit could be removed altogether but I didn't really look into it too much.

If there's a shell account (i.e. more than just an ftp upload site or portal, the ability to SSH or telnet into the web server itself) for coloradoshooting.org on the hosting server, it's likely that bbadmin may be able to change the setting. If there's no shell account tied to the hosting or if the setting can't be changed on a per-user basis then the provider will have to change it and they may be reluctant to do so depending how powerful the server is.