Website will be down later today

[TomTom]

?ello

Last Weekend Encryption and I have bought and tested the vbulletin board software and agreed that it is more comfortable to use as the free phpBB board we used since 2002. We will all benefit from the new board Software because our database grows constantly and with the new board Software, we are making the necessary steps to be able to provide you with a fast and reliable message board in the Future as well. You guys will also like the new board Software because it has some handy Features that come with it.

We have informed you already that we plan to decrease the number of available Forums and to make the board more accessible again. As we do not want the Website to be down several times while we implement the necessary changes, we decided to re-structure the Forum layout AND switch to the vbulletin board Software in only one Strike. As we can't do this while the board is online, it will be most probably down from today 6 PM (my time GMT +1, 12 AM NYC time) and right now we can't tell exactly how long it will take as we once again enter and break new Frontiers. So please bear with us and we hope that we can welcome you back at least a day later after the board went offline.

Please be aware of the few Changes that this process will cause:

- the website name will be changed back to Mercuryserver and so will the url. Because we plan to take a few brands out and move them to separate Sites, we can go back to what this community was called since the beginning... www.mercuryserver.com We will install a refer link so you will still be able to access the site by entering www.mercurynation.com though.

- The Forum Index will look totally different than now...no Mercuynation/Mercuryserver/Mercuryengine/Mercurypromotion anymore...just Mercuryserver and Mercurysessions Forums

- we might not be able to implement download Features directly because we can't use our scripts any longer and have to switch to what vbulletin offers and it might happen that we come back without downloads but it?s just a question of time until we implement them again and be sure that any delay will be remembered and the sets will stay available for a longer time.

- Games, the Interview section and the Photo Album will no longer be available after we have switched to the new board Software. We might be able to bring back the Photo Album and the Interview section but the Games will definitely be History after the Change.

[Kamal]

Re: Website will be down later today

Yes folks, one of the biggest reasons for us to move to vbulletin was because of the departure of the lead programmer of phpBB from their team. Though I will continue to use variants of phpBB on the other sites, it was important to the team to get a strong, dependable and secure bulletin board for the board with the most traffic i.e. MercuryServer. (we average 5.5 million hits to that board each month).

As we have always said, we work endlessly at making this place as comfortable as possible for you folks and we realize as much as this becomes a hindrance rather than a benefit, these are steps we need to continue to take.

We apologise for the inconvenience and we hope to minimize this downtime as far as possible.

Many thanks

- Kamal

[Kamal]

I have moved this thread to GYY to discuss and answer any questions you folks might have

[rewing3]

Good Luck with everything. Can't wait to see the new board.

[Steve Graham]

Re: Website will be down later today

where can we find info on the vBulletin software?

[Kamal]

https://www.vbulletin.com

some of the largest forums on the planet are using vbulletin

http://forums.offtopic.com/

http://forums.somethingawful.com/

http://www.WebhostingTalk.Com

http://www.christianforums.com/

http://www.genmay.net/

http://www.msusenet.com/

http://www.pbnation.com/

http://www.literotica.com:81/forum/

[shosh]

i like the look of the current setup...

im not found of the look of vb....

[Kamal]

they will all be skinned, no worries