would you like some cheese with your whine? should we call you a wahmbulance? Or would you care to just quit bitching so damned much? [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-tongue.gif[/img]

OK. Here's the deal. Basically, once deleted, there's no good interface to restore a category, as far as I can find. This seems to be a limitation/shortcoming of the Fusetalk engine. Not having raw database access, I can neither confirm nor deny whether the database entries even exist anymore -- but I wouldn't count on it.

It would be possible to create a "graveyard" category of sorts, or to make the "Trash Bin" category publicly viewable. However, because of the nature of things that get tossed in the trash bin, that's not going to be made public. A graveyard category would get quite cluttered very quickly, and restoring a category from the random threads scattered in such a place would be a HUGE pain in the ass for whatever unlucky mod/admin got stuck doing it.

As far as why the category was deleted, generally we're deleting any anime header category that goes more than a couple weeks without significant activity. My personal policy is a month of inactivity, but the other admins decide what to enforce on their own judgement.

There may be a way for us to accomodate this idea in the future, which I'll discuss with the other admins. However, at present, this isn't possible.