So I replied to the avatar story thread in the cafe, and double posted. No big deal, just delete the second post which phpBB lets you do assuming nobody else has replied yet...
Except the I got the dreaded blank page instead of \"success\" and the whole thread vanished...
-_-
I should have known better than edit/delete any post larger than a 30-40 characters. The database server always seems to have major problems with larger posts and edits/deletes.
I fixed it. Went into my browser history and pulled the original topic link, which got back to the unlisted thread, corrected the reply and it showed up in the topic list again... bleh.