Welcome back!!!
Well, it took a lot longer than I'd hoped, but we're finally back.
Long story short: the structural damage from a transformer explosion and fire in our hosting facility kept turning out to be more extensive than expected, so it was a long time until anyone was allowed back inside by security... and our offsite backup was corrupted. Since the community is what makes this site worthwhile so I decided it was better to wait a few extra weeks than try to relaunch the forums from scratch with no archives or users.
I've put measures in place to address the DB issue which will hopefully prevent downtime like this in future... the offsite bakcup will be monitored, incremental, checksumed routinely and tested manually on our testing instance every few months. I'd hoped to get some upgrades and repairs done as part of the restart (new phpBB version, skin updates/repairs, voting features) but those will have to wait... it's been long enough that I'm just glad you're back.
Moreover, the RC hasn't been idle in the meantime. We've had some really interesting discussions about the future and philosophy of the format, and some changes may be coming to the banned list in a few weeks so it's important to have these here so we can (A) distribute the update and (B) give you guys a place to discuss it and give feedback.
Finally, to thank everyone for their patience I'm planning to resurrect an old tradition from the forums' early days... contests with judge foil prizes mailed out to the winners

You guys are a great community and I really am sorry for the damage this downtime has caused. Thanks again!
Gavin