External Not working?

[blindchild02]

http://www.carchops.com/forum.php

On the right sidebar, it has the title "Threads" which is supposed to pull the latest X amount of threads there. I was working up until about 3 days ago, in which it just abruptly stopped.

[Lynne]

Your external.php page has a database error, therefore nothing is being spit out. You need to fix the database error on that page.

<!--
Database error in vBulletin 3.6.7:

Invalid SQL:

	SELECT text, headers, dateline
	FROM externalcache
	WHERE cachehash = '9f6585958530d8f0be9a3d920a31ece7' AND
		 dateline &gt;= 1223159846;

MySQL Error  : Table './blind02_carchops/externalcache' is marked as crashed and should be repaired
Error Number : 145
Date         : Saturday, October 4th 2008 @ 05:38:26 PM
Script       : http://www.carchops.com/external.php
Referrer     : 
IP Address   : xxxx
Username     : Unregistered
Classname    : vB_Database
-->

Repair/Optimize the externalcache table

[blindchild02]

Any tips on how to do that? I'm not big on databases

also, why would it just randomly get an error?

EDIT: ok, I repaired it, but Im just wondering as to why it crashed in the first place.

Thanks for the help

[Lynne]

Sometimes tables crash. I couldn't tell you why, but they do every once in a while so you repair it (sometimes you have to run the repair/optimize a couple of times until it says it's all OK) and hope that is the end of the issue.