Neowin News: Good day this is your Captain speaking

Well.. first off I want to show some appreciation to Hosttyme for supporting us throughout our decided downtime. They have been an immensly supportive with some server issues we've been having. Despite the flood of emails that came from this community accusing them of "closing us down" they have shown great strength and support.

We decided to close temporarily to try and track down some serious issues we were having with the server. There are still problems relating to PHP and Mysql but we still have plans to resolve these at off-peak times for the server. We cannot be completely sure of a permanent solution but we do know now that our user base hits around 600 at any one time when we send them direct to the forums.

We plan to try PHP 4.1.2 (recommended by vbulletin team member) and MySQL 4.0.2 together initially, if this is no good then we will go back to 4.1.2 with MySQL 3 (a situation that worked before all the upgrading)

We used Invisionboard for a time, I like the board but it doesn't do what we require, so despite the fast changeover we reverted back to vbulletin. We will re-evaluate the situation with v1.1 of Invision & VB3 (beta) that is due in September. We have a license that is good thru Sep 2003 so we will use it if we can.

Additionally there are so many people I want to thank. Brad of Stardock, Gorman & iMike of Deskmod for their server knowledge, eva2000 on vbulletin who seems to have a wealth of knowledge (or knows where to get it) and the many many people who sent us emails of support and appreciation. Lets also not forget the staff that setup a temporary site where Neowinians could get together for a status report and the IRC channel that kept crashing because it overloaded with Neowin users. You all rock I also want to thank the many sites that reported on our status. The amount of sites that reported this (even some I didn't know existed) really showed us how we are appreciated even by sites that might also be consider competition in other circumstances.

Thankyou everyone

Neowin Staff