The forum was offline for several hours today while we upgraded some server software and implemented some optimizations for the forum. Hopefully the forum will be even faster now, with the use of some caching mechanisms, and it can now automatically throttle search database thrashing for guests in case we find another spider hitting the search page unreasonably.
The one thing we didn't succeed with, despite some real attempts, was moving forum database completely to UTF8 -- you should expect another down period next week perhaps when we try to revisit that, and hopefully clear up the remaining issues with posting in non-english languages.
Thanks for bearing with us!
