Bihira have replied, and they have told me that they were working on the servers to prevent high server loads.

The site itself does seem to be running a bit faster this morning, although we're still not completely happy with it. Liam and I intend to split the main operator topics by month as a temporary measure to see if this helps things. It's definitely the easiest way for us to get rid of the massive 18,000 post thread at the moment. We'll sort it similar to how Andreos suggested on Page 1 of this thread. If you guys like it, we can keep it. If you don't, we'll work on splitting it by topic.

If you notice the main operator threads disappearing from the board today - it's just us restricting access so that we can split them.