IMPORTANT: ALL MEMBERS

Everyone

We've had a number of hardware issues recently. You've probably experienced problems on the message boards with posts disappearing and reappearing. The problem here has been the age of some of our servers. We've recently had a number of server failures which have caused problems in the databases that support the web site. In addition, the older servers are slow. Our newest software is going to need better, faster machines. We can't upgrade the website until we've improved our servers. This process is ongoing and we've replaced a number of them recently.

Friday evening, the 9th of December at around 10PM Pacific time, we're going to replace one of our main servers. When we replace this one, it will be impossible for a period of anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes to post to any of the message boards. This is a very important change to support future upgrades, but also it will replace old hardware that has been prone to failure.

We know how much you depend on the boards to make contact with people who are helping you. For some people, they've become a life line ... a way to reach for and achieve a new life. We're committed to serving you as well as we can, but we sometimes fail in getting changes done cleanly and so cause you problems. We'll do our best to let you know when things are changing so you can be prepared. We're here for you and we hope you'll at least give us credit for trying.

We appreciate your patience as we work through this.

Amy Williams
Member Services Dept