Sorry for the lack of notice.. the new version was required to address several issues, including being able to better support PHP 7.2+.
The error log was filling at a prodigious rate, causing the forum to time out on some requests.
As a side-effect of the update to SMF 2.0.17, everybody had to logon again.. sorry about that too.
We'll have another longer outage in the future as I move the forum from shared hosting to a VPS I can manage.. I'll let you know when that will be.
Best regards,
Ken