We are currently experiencing a flood of requests from bots scraping the forums. Unfortunately it has gotten to the point where it is negatively impacting the site. As a result the forums may be slow and you may periodically experiance an error message.
We are aware of the problem and apologize for the inconvenience.
You do not need an 'I'm back' topic after being gone only 3 weeks. Next time you go away, go away for several months. THEN, you can have a welcome back topic.