Alright, so every night without fail, at 8:30 GMT + 13.00, the forum seems to crash.
Pages stop loading for 10 minutes, and for 5 minutes after that, the pages load, but an error comes up saying 'MySQL data error' and then a whole bunch of complicated words and numbers and to report it to your IP master or something.
Does anybody else experience this, know what this is, and/or how to avoid it?

You can't avoid it other than doing something else. It's the servers going through a maintenance routine and usually last for 10 to 15 minutes, although I normally don't get the data errors.

This has been happening for years now. There's no way to avoid it, it's just something you have to learn to live with. If you learn to anticipate it then whenever you near that dreaded time you can go off and do other things for the roughly 10 minutes the forums are going to be down.

This happens to me alot. It gets annoying when I post something and it crashes, especially when I've written 8 paragraphs to an Rp.

I had the experience of posting around the time of a crash, then closing my browser, and then returning in a few minutes to discover my post had become a double post...I couldn't quite figure out how I made a double post....then I saw the very same thing happen to another forum member on another day when the forum crashed, and figured that it must be some weird glitch when the forum crashes. It causes unintended double posts. I'm very glad you can edit your posts here for a number of reasons and this is one of them.

Solution: Type long posts in Notepad or Word then copy it over. Prevents any unforeseen errors.

Oddly, I've only seen the forums down during their upgrades over the last year. I'm probably asleep when maintenance happens.

Never seen this happen. Must have to do with my timezone.

Yeah, it happens all the time. It rarely affects me though. Its around 2 or 3 am my time. The forums are usually dead at that time anyway, so I dont get on.