Hey guys, thanks in advance for your patience with this huge upgrade.
The servers are struggling to cope with the load due to the post conversion going on in the background. Basically the forum upgrade from 2.3.x to 3.0.5 meant that over 9 million posts needed to be converted to the new database structure. Almost everything about the post data is different from the previous version, bbcode, topic titles and a bunch of smilies aren"t being rendered.
So we"re going to turn the forums offline for now so that our servers don"t melt. Dave is enjoying a well deserved rest and will be back later today to continue the upgrade process and hopefully sort out the load problems
Luckily the news site isn"t suffering, so we don"t need to disable that.
Again, thanks for your understanding and support while we iron out the remaining issues.