I am very sorry for the long down time and the disappointing outcome.
This is a shame, but I was not able to update the forum. I took it offline at the end of November to switch to the newest version of phpBB, but this ended in a couple of error messages I could not get rid off. While I should be able to save the forum (with alle the users and postings) I was not able to run the gallery (contests, user galleries, wish voting...) under the new version of the forum. Since I did not want to loose any of your pictures I decided to go back to the old version for now. But I kept a test folder to experiment and I hope we will still see a forum AND gallery update in the future without loosing any of your pictures.
January has begun already, and I will start a new contest tomorrow. The topic will be "What happened in 2016?" and I would love to see many of you return with creative ideas on how to deal with this year. 
