To explain what happened: I changed the default display to group forums similar to how they were grouped in the old software. That doesn’t work perfectly in the ontology of the new software, it doesn’t make a distinction between a forum and a forum group. As a result, there were posts in the “Philosophy Forums” category that weren’t connected to any subcategory.
So when I changed the layout, I also changed permissions for the parent category to prevent new posts not attached to a subcategory. That caused both the issues you were having: It stopped you from replying to your thread because it wasn’t attached to a subcategory, so no one was allowed to reply to it (that’s a pretty obvious whoopsie on my part.)
Less obvious was that chat inherits permissions from the category it’s associated with, so when I made it so no one could post in the “Philosophy Forums” top-level category, it made it so no one could post in the Philosophy chat either. Also a whoopsie, but a subtle and interesting one.
All of these should be fixed now, with my apologies.
I also apologize for things I will break in the near future – I’ll be adding some requested features soon, and as usual I will undertake those changes with the finesse of a rhinoceros repairing a watch.
