mailing lists shutting down; forums being upgraded

Hello Everyone

This is a final email, to remind everyone that the public mailing lists are
shutting down. The "plug will be pulled" at 5:00pm MST. Also, at this time, we
will be taking down the forums so that they can be upgraded to the latest
version of the forum software. At this point, it is unknown how long the forums
will be down; we hope they won't be down that long, but as one of the upgrade
tasks involves rebuilding the search index, which for a forum with as many
messages as ours, is going to be very time-consuming, the forum upgrade process
could take a while. In a worst-case scenario, the forums may not be back up and
available until Saturday morning. We realize that this is very inconvenient for
some of you, but we try not to make a habit of doing this sort of thing, and
we've tried to schedule it at a point when the forums have the least amount of
traffic.

If you find yourself going into "forum withdrawal", I'd like to suggest taking a
walk, getting some fresh air, maybe spend some time with your family. Treat
yourself to a good meal!

While the forums are down for maintenance, we will put up a page saying just
that. When the forums are back up and ready to use, this page will go away and
will be replaced by the normal forum index.

We understand that this transition is not popular with some of you. However, we
really hope that you'll give the forums a chance, and try to adapt them into
your workflow.

cheers

w