OK folks, I was able to restore the thread, but unfortunately the most recent backup that contained it was from March, so we have lost the past 5 months or so of posts there. very sorry about that.
I'm going to take measures to both prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future, and improve the backup retention system.
Thanks for your patience and understanding with this, I'm sure it's frustrating for those of you who had posted there recently.