Midnite and I have become increasingly dissatisfied with our current host and more than likely at some point this weekend we'll be beginning the process to switch the forum over to a new host. That will require the forum to be shut down at some point until the switch has been completed and everything has been setup on the new host. In an ideal world, that might not take much time - but, sadly, we don't live in an ideal world. The average downtime for a hosting switch is 24 to 48 hours, and we'll certainly post a notice of when the switch has begun to take place. But having already gone through three hosts, we've learned that the process can sometimes take closer to the 48 hours (or even longer), depending on how long it takes TPTB that handle the Internet's DNS servers to point our domain to the new hosting account.
The good news in all this, though, is that after the switch the forum will have more than 10 times the Web storage space that it currently has and more than 3 times the allocated bandwidth that it currently has. Some of you may not have the vaguest idea what that means, but suffice it to say that it will allow us to introduce some new features as well as revive some older ones without having to worry that we'll run out of Web storage space too soon or that the forum will slow to a crawl. So hopefully any inconvenience the switching downtime might bring will be more than made up for after the switch finalizes.