As you have no doubt noticed, the server was unavailable for several days, and the message board has also been down. The reason for the downtime is two-fold: first, the hard drive of the server was partially failing, and, second, the original backup that I reinstalled after the hard drive was replaced was incomplete. This necessitated reinstalling the old hard drive and recovering several MySQL tables necessary for vBulletin and then a struggle to get vBulletin to work correctly again. Fortunately, a reinstall of vBulletin (and an upgrade to version 3.0.3) seems to have finally fixed the problems that the site had been experiencing.
I apologize for the downtime, and am weighing options to ensure greater availability in the face of unreliable hardware.