Hi everyone! I"m pleased to report that with the help of many of our staff we succesfully ported Neowin to Invision Board Forums on our new server hosted by Invision Power Services. All the themes and member data remained intact except the avatars. Everyone will need to re-submit their avatars but we did manage to enhance our themes and make them fully compatible with Mozilla/NS6.
We left our previous host MikeMTH on short notice because we couldn"t agree on the terms for advertising on Neowin. All I can say is that we were unable to give any kind of notice when this happened but Mike did allow us to host a temporary "offline" page that re-directed to the MSN community (which is also now closed for some unknown reason).
Invision Power Services has agreed to host Neowin without the use of pop-up ads and we will start by advertising their services and using their forum software which we also have an active role in its creation (be it bug submit"s or own code hacks).
We can understand that some people were not happy to see us go offline "yet again" but Neowin is it"s own worst enemy when it comes to site running costs. We want to keep Neowin free of intrusive ad"s and pop-ups but as you can see this is a very difficult task without the backing of a sponsor. I ask that you be patient and not panic if you see a "Server Busy" message because this week will be spent optimizing Neowin and the server. In fact Invision Boards creator Matt has offered to look over some code in an effort to streamline Neowin on this server.
On another note, the giveaway planned for October will go ahead in November. We have to mail all the participating companies to confirm that they are "still in" but as far as we are concerned we can go ahead for a November giveaway. Stay tuned for more details on that.
Thanks everyone for your support and to our wonderful staff for getting Neowin back on it"s feet. (don"t forget to check out the themes in the forum, they rock!)