Neowin Forums currently being upgraded

Neowin is currently upgrading its forums to Invision Power Board 3. During this time, the forums will be inaccessible. This upgrade started at 8:30 GMT, and we expect it to continue well into tonight. By tomorrow morning, we expect that our upgrade will be complete, and service returned to normal.

Here’s just a few things you can expect to see once we come back:

• Karma: If you find a post helpful, you can "like" it in the same way you can like a news post on the front page.
• Favourite Forums: Click the heart icon next to a forum to set that forum as a favourite. Any forum you mark as a favourite will appear at the top of the board index.
• Full page spy: This page allows you to watch everything that happens on Neowin. It offers a full page view of the "Latest Forum Activity" feature our users have enjoyed for years, with the addition of new front page comments into the mix.
• Conversations: Private messages are now formatted so you can easily look back on an exchange of messages between you and another user. It's similar to how Gmail handles email conversations.

During this upgrade, you will be able to join our Neowin IRC network - for more details, please see this page.

Thank you all for your patience on this matter - this upgrade has been a long one, and we really hope that the fixes we made will keep the forums up permanently this time.

Update (10:30pm GMT): After a few issues with getting the database backed up (It was causing load on the MySQL server used for the News, hence the issues you may have seen with the front page) we have now begun the running of the upgrade script. Estimated time remaining, around 5 hours (roughly, it may be more, we need to check that we really have fixed the previous load issues). Thanks for your patience everyone! - Dave

Update 2 (3:50am GMT): The forum upgrade script is now complete. We just need to install the skins, and edit a few settings, make sure everything's working, and then we're good to go. Shouldn't be more than an hour longer, all being well. - Dave

Update 3 (10:00am GMT): There's a few bugs with the skins that we are working on. The server load is fine but we want to work out all the bugs before we put the forums online again.