They're back.
I believe that they have been snuck in during a major upgrade to FreeForums servers that took place overnight on Tuesday.
The system was totally down at 5 a.m. wednesday - with an 'upgrade in progress' message displayed.
Quote:
Tonight at 10PM EST we will be upgrading our MySQL shared server. This server is responsible for housing information shared across all forums and customers (whereas customer data is aggregated across multiple MySQL data servers). This task is pretty straight forward, but it will require a bit of downtime to all customers. We expect it to take roughly half an hour to complete, but it may go as long as one hour.
(It actually took minutes short of five hours)