Scheduled downtime February 16 to change hosts

Hey all, it's been a while. :)

Some of you may have noticed a few blips of extended downtime over the past few months. Unfortunately, we've had a lot of issues with our current host that have gone unresolved, so we're moving to a new host. To prevent any loss of data during the switch-over, I'll be putting the site into maintenance mode tomorrow, February 16 at 5PM PT and I expect the migration to take about 4 hours. During this time, the site will be unavailable; however, all of your content will be ready to access again from the new server as soon as the migration is complete.

I apologize for the inconvenience during the downtime, but hopefully we'll all come out in a better place with a stable, long-term new host and get back to the years and years of no-downtime service that I've been proud of. You all deserve it. Thank you for your understanding!

Alrighty, we are back! It took a little longer than expected, but… we did it.

I'll (probably) write up more soon on why we moved hosts, but the short answer is that the old hosts had become wildly unreliable (for example, banning and unbanning my accounts multiple times over the past few months) while also being extremely unresponsive (taking multiple days to respond while the site was down), etc.

We've had a pretty darn good uptime for the site over the almost ten years it has been around, and I'm extremely protective over any downtime – especially when it's for dumb reasons and/or reasons out of my control. We never know when inspiration will strike, so it's important that the tools you use to organize and dive deeper into that inspiration are always available, any time you need them. This server migration, while painful in the short term, should set the site up for long-term success for many, many more years to come.

So, again: thank you so much for your patience while I worked through this absolutely huge migration. There's still a lot more for me to do behind the scenes to finish the migration, but the site doesn't need to be down for any of that. We got past the hard part; the site should be stable now and ready for you to use again.

Happy worldbuilding!

As a little follow-up to this: you might notice the site is slightly slower today. I'm still working behind the scenes to move over all the background services and resources that we use to the new servers (so some parts of the site are communicating between the two servers, which is slower), but I expect the site to speed up a lot as soon as they're all moved over; there won't be any more downtime while I work on all this, it'll just magically resolve itself for you soon (probably near the end of today or early tomorrow). Thanks again for your patience. :)