I noticed too. A lot of authors use dial-up, and when the site was so slow, they didn't bother updating. One author I knew did not even keep her stories on her hard-drive but wrote directly in the AFF window and posted. She's an AWESOME writer. And then the adminisrator told her if she kept doing that, she was going to have her stories deleted. (I won't say who, but I got the same message when I did that) So when the read-only came up, she couldn't post and got frustrated, and just didn't come back. I e-mailed her a couple times to let her know about the place where you could post, but the site was still so damn slow, I think that she just gave up.
I mean, there are many steps to know what happened here. I've had comments like: "AFF is so fucked-up" that they didn't want to even bother looking. I couldn't help but agree. The adminisrators said March, and it's June. How long does something like this take? I'm sure that they are to some degree frustrated as well, but would you want to post at a site where the admins threatened to take your work off, even though you were following what they said in their updates concerning their site (being back up by March). It's a circus. I hope that they learn a little more diplomacy regarding their posts and messages to authors.
EDIT: have you noticed that at the top of the page there are maybe no more than 10 people on the site at a time? It used to be three or four lines of people reading, browsing, updating. Sometimes it was so busy that streaming was limited. Now it's like a wide open range. So, in my estimation, about 2/3rds of the people have yet to re-discover AFF.