This is my hunch (and something that Doctor Oak posted on the announcements..... thingy):
We almost literally traveled back in time, to two weeks before or something. My new account, Shiny_Eevee IV, was also deleted. Something happed to the new server or whatever. All the posts after the... I think it was the server transfer... were gone because, well, something happened. Read this:
Yeah, we've travelled back in time to about 2 weeks ago forums wise. Basically, we had no other backups than the one I had when I transferred the site so there was no way to restore anything after that.
Apologies to all, but we're lucky we have anything left at all really.
As for your Avatar problem... I can see everyone's avvies okay, so it could be your computer (and some people emptied out their their photobucket... bucket, or something). I don't know what happed to the newbie select-your-avatar-from-the-list thingy, though. I know you're not talking about the "get my own custom avatar" thing, because, well, I changed my avatar to get it to what I wanted it to be, I looked at the place where the sample image pops up, and I see, no list for the newbie-avatar selection thing! Doc (or some other admin/mod that knows what happened), what happened there?
EDIT: Okay, I can't see some people's avvies.... but some others I can see...