[Jason Snell]

Your account has not been deleted. It's still at forums.maccentral.com, and that forum is staying up. But news stories now link into the Macworld.com forums, which have also been around for several years. People like MacCheetah have thousands of posts because they've been active on these forums for a long, long time.
There are lots of reasons why the story forums now link to the Macworld.com forums, but a lot of it has to do with making the site more unified and the fact that these forums are running a much more recent version of the forum software. MC is a part of Macworld and so MC stories now post to the MW forums. But we have also kept the MC forums around in parallel.
I admit it's all quite unclear right now -- we'll make some changes to make it clearer where the MC forums are and what the deal is with registering on the MW forums if you haven't before. We'll try to rectify that soon.

[Jason Snell]

The MC forums aren't supposed to be up "temporarily," they're supposed to be up for as long as people are using them. I would imagine that will be a long time. We certainly have no plans to shut them down.
But the Macworld.com forums are the preferred forums for Macworld.com, and MacCentral is a part of Macworld.com. We will keep the old forum up out of deference to the strong community that's in place there, but all new forums and new development (including creating the new links to the new story forums on the new version of the web site) will happen on the Macworld.com forums.

[Nobody]

At first I was fairly excited to see a change to the layout, being into that kinda thing. But, after 2 days, I gotta say, the change to MacCentral.com is not for the best. Several posts have eloquenlty laid out the faults of size, wasted space, low usability, visited stories, posting time, comments, etc,, The real kicker for me is that there is no longer a list of the day's stories. It was terrific to read a story and at the bottom of the story have a list of what else there is to read or ignore. It was brilliant and not used by other sites. Speaking of which, MacCentral is no longer my first stop for Mac-related news. It may even fall to somewhat below MacEdition.com (if you aren't familiar, they stopped posting news in December).
It's amazing that with the re-design MacCentral went from the most usable to the least usable Mac news site out there.
Serious overhauls are needed to get me back ... though I'll likely stick with the forums.