As you have noticed, for the past few months the forums were sluggish every now and then. That was due to players requesting faction tracker data. In itself it isn't an issue, it just so happen we had grown beyond five million rows of data and the server was starting to not be too happy about it.
In order to ensure the forums remain stable, the current data has been duplicated in another database to be kept for historical reasons and the current database purged.
Someone forgot to purge their activity records:
"Imgur is over capacity!
Sorry! We're busy running around with our hair on fire because Imgur is over capacity! This can happen when the site is under a very heavy load, or while we're doing maintenance. "