The recent site down time was caused by an update applied to the physical servers our site runs on top off by the hosting company.This update was to tackle the recent Meltdown & Spectre vulnerabilities that where discovered.
Please see this site if you are interested in more details of the above vulnerabilities https://blog.barkly.com/meltdown-spectre-bugs-explained.
We where unlucky, as the patch was applied and the systems restarted whilst our backup was running, This corrupted several key areas of our site, Including the Backup, File system and Database.
I'm currently working on fully recovering the site, So far I've copied a work in progress layout from my test server along with recovering all the Forum content itself.
At this point the missing data is from the social side of the site, this includes your Profile Pictures, Private Messages, Friends Lists and Photo Albums.
The above items i'm working on but can't currently give an estimate on when they will be reinstated. In the mean time feel free to upload new avatars etc.. should you wish
Simon