Hi,

I'll be upgrading the forum software soon. There's a newer version of the forum itself, and there's been two updates to the blog plugin since I set that up. Hopefully it'll go smoothly. I'm also trying to do a little database maintenence while I'm at it. I may delete a bunch of older topics from the Jets forum. I had planned on doing this as a part of moving all the oldest 'keeper' topics into other forums as an archive. I can now easily mass prune the Jets forum without losing anything important. I will probably delete any topics with less than 3 or 4 replies.

I'm also checking into optimizing the database. It doesn't seem to complete on tables with the largest percentage of stored data. I do notice a speed increase rendering pages since I've worked on it, but I'm not satified or confident that something won't happen again.

Another possibility toward fixing this might be to disable an RSS feed or two to see if there's something happening with the weird characters in the posts to disrupt the script or corrupt the database. I've been looking for some way of filtering that garbage out for over a year now, but no luck yet.

I'll be running the upgrades to the forum software and the blog plugin on the test board first, and resolving any issues I may find with the skin.

Thanks for your patience with regard to the downtime. I have to leave the site unattended most of the time, and it's been great until now. I'm hoping the worst of it was a few hours of downtime here or there. We have all but a few threads I had to delete because they were blank. The fact that they were RSS imports makes me think it might be part of the problem.

That's it for now.. I'm on the case in the limited amount of time I have to work on it.

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