[Mindi]

Look, we're preparing for a major upgrade and system migration to new forum software that will also include a complete redesign of just about all of our sites (with the exclusion of the store). While we do not like outages anymore than you do, sometimes they are necessary and in this case we are having a little pain from time to time now to prevent a major outage later.

We determined that during the US holiday this past weekend would be a good time to do some of this work as a lot of people here would have other plans and not be online as much. While I wish we could give exact times, it's simply not possible when you are doing the kind of work we are talking about. For the most part, the outages just had a message that said "The forums are closed" and at one point we put up a generic message about maintenance.

What we have learned from the maintenance and testing we did this past weekend has helped us in reducing the amount of time the forum will have to be down when we do the site conversion. Some companies have taken days to weeks to do the type of conversion we are talking about doing and we are trying to get it down to a one or two day outage over a future weekend at most.

Please be patient as I think the results will be well worth it with many new features for the users with the new software. Everyone will be hearing more about this conversion soon and when it comes time to do the site migration we will be giving people notice as to what weekend it will be and an approximate timeframe. Please keep in mind though that things can change and no process is foolproof, so every timeframe will be an estimate and is not written in stone.