[Lynne]

Originally Posted by patracy

But if I do that to live, won't I break the live site?

No, not if you also did this which I wrote:
***
(Change back to live url and turn live site back on)
***

Originally Posted by patracy

And on another note, could I just go into the database and update the datastore table under options value and replace anything that had the live forums domain name with http://123.456.789.123 ?

If you know how to deal with serialized data, then sure you can do that. If you don't know how to deal with serialized data, then you could break your site doing this so make sure you make a copy of the data before changing it.