The staff at Neowin would like to thank you for your continued patience as we work to improve the site. As you probably know, we are continually working on the performance of the site to keep up with growth and demand. We started some of these changes yesterday after a few weeks of planning and internal testing but the conversion process took a lot longer on our main database (which is 5.6GB) compared to our relatively small test site. In addition, some unexpected complications cropped up with the planned setup, so we"re falling back to a more conservative, but still improved, plan.
Given the length of the downtime, we should have better prepared our users so that they were prepared to deal with any related withdrawal symptoms. I personally am getting reacquainted with many real life friends and family. I might even have gone outside if not for the bloody heat. :p
At any rate, progress is being made and the coderators are working feverishly on the site. We hope to have the forums back online soon. Please continue to be patient. Thank you.