Advance notice of forum downtime
The current server is full to the brim with data and struggling with the workload so its time to move servers yet again. I'll be doing this over this weekend 5th/6th June.
I've already moved 27 domains across to the new server in the last 24 hours and all has gone pretty well with no great dramas and everything is spinning away nicely.
The Comrades in Arms is the last move to make so I hope I haven't spoken too soon!
In the transition period you will just see a holding page so just return an hour or two later. You need do nothing to your stored favourites or shortcuts.
Once back on line there will be a period where you just see the holding page as the new server address is propagate to DNS across the world. Every site done so far has been visible within two minutes but I dare say the delay will be longer for our more far flung forum users.
Anyhoo, sorry in advance for the planned outage.
Comrades in Arms server move is now complete - 0830hrs 05/06/2010
Having monitored server loading and error logs during the day I've made some server configuration tweaks to speed up page serving, stop Apache crashing every 15 minutes and fix folder permission errors.
Logs are nice and quiet now and everything seems to be ripping along nicely. Time for some gardening now I think...
Stuff I don't understand...
Good work! 
Heh, the forum is ripping along now with instant page loads - it will be interesting to see what happens during the week when all my commercial sites get loaded with traffic as well.
Wooooaaah, it's all different!
Yup, the forum skin is now switched to the new CiA corporate style that will be rolled through to the web site (yeah, needs updating which I will do now Jedburgh is out of the way).
The new colour scheme is more restful and quieter (and more period-ish) than the old greenish style (that looked rather garish on some monitors). I know its a shock but you should get used to it very quickly - I've been using it for two months now and I get a shock switching back to the green one!
Apologies - host had a major connectivity problem at lunchtime today (11th Jan) caused by the tea lady catching her trolley on the mains plug. All sorted now.
EDIT:
Important service message
Earlier today, a system outage occurred at our data centre. Please allow us to firstly apologise if you were in any way affected by this unfortunate event.
The outage occurred while an external third party was carrying out routine maintenance in our data centre. Due to a human error, our fire prevention systems were accidentally activated, sending the servers into safe mode and suspending online connectivity.
Data protection is our biggest concern. Accordingly, the data centre is configured to prevent major incidents, such as fire, causing permanent data loss. We hope you understand that this is our foremost concern.
We deeply regret any problems that this outage may have caused you, and please rest assured that we working flat-out to quickly resume normal service.
Heh, my joke wasn't far wrong! 
Advance notice
At 12.30am, Monday 18th July 2011 the forum server will be off-line for a couple of hours for scheduled essential maintenance.
This should only affect post-midnight lurkers and more distant forum users - apologies for the disruption.
Very slow page loading times at the moment, (late afternoon Friday 19th August) at least via BT networks. If you are affected my apologies but it isn't a server problem - it seems to be a connectivity issue somewhere between the server and your PC.
Issue confirmed to be a BT (and associated ISPs) routing network problem. Seems to be intermittent, one page loads lickety-spick, next page stalls. If you get a partial page or slow loading then stop the page load and refresh.
Still seems to be ongoing, although improving.
Happy to report BT have untied the knots and everything seems to be lickety-spit on the BT networks now.
LATEST
I have just reconfigured the WW2airsoft.org.uk server which entails new DNS propagation. So, for the next 24hours or so it is possible that users may get 'server not found' messages, especially those abroad. This is just a temporary phase and will pass once domain name servers across the world are updated.
Advance notice
Somewhere between 0200hr and 0500hr, Monday 3rd October 2011, the forum server will be off-line for up to two hours for scheduled essential maintenance.
This should only affect post-midnight lurkers and more distant forum users - apologies for the disruption.
SEARCH updated
In the past searches have been limited to words of four letters or more in order to speed searches and limit the server load (the number of one, two or three lettered words on this forum is massive). So a search for 'AGM' or 'K98' or 'hop' would rather unhelpfully give a "No suitable matches were found." error message.
Anyhoo, given the server even at peak load isn't remotely stressed I've made a tweak and now you should find three letter word searches will be productive.
Please bear in mind, as with all searches, that the better qualified your query, the better the search result. So please make use of the qualifying options - restricting a search to a particular forum section or author; place + in front of a word which must be found; place a - in front of a word which must not be found; use * as a wildcard for partial matches.
Advance notice of forum downtime and tinkering
Time for a forum software upgrade. This is a major one so I'll be taking the route of a fresh install. This means, for a while, you will be presented with a 'plain vanilla' version of the forum - then bit by bit I'll add in the mods and the custom forum skin.
Wherever possible I'll make changes live but there will be times when I'll have to take the forum off-line. During this process you find that some things aren't working as they once did so please don't pester! Once everything is in place I'll let you know here, then we can iron out issues at that point.
Forum update
The forum software now updated, mods reinstalled and functionally all seems OK, so that's a ball-ache out of the way.
The sharp-eyed might notice that the old Arcade stuff has now gone - the developer hasn't updated the software for a couple of years and as no one uses it now it has been dumped.
However, I have added new functionality with image handling. Now, whether photos are linked to or attached they will be re-sized to 600px wide but can be zoomed into, should the viewer so choose. The old 'thumbnail' sizing of attachments has been superseded by this new mod and it should prevent the accidental linking to huge images that stretch the forum off the desktop.
And a reminder about the 'collapse forum' tool. The double chevron button on the right-hand side of each forum section header collapses or expands each section. So if you have no interest in Past Games or Soviet Forces (say) then you can tuck them out of the way to keep your viewing area minimal. Your selection is held in your member record and doesn't use a cookie, so the selection will remain whatever computer you use to access the forum.
Should there be any weirdness following the upgrades drop me a PM please, I've not spotted anything yet. But do me a favour and hit F5 before you do PM please to ensure you are looking at an up to date page. 
Did someone just change the forum list font?!
Well that was an exciting few minutes - sorry for those using Firefox and IE (Chrome users were OK), back to normal now. Just a missing " in a style sheet.
As an aside I've been having a deluge of spammers attempting forum access this past few days, I've changed techniques to foil them three times now, hope the forth one calms the storm!
Did someone just change the forum list font?!
I noticed that, too! Where was the prior announcement for that ?!
You've got nothing to ein, zwei, drei, vier
I use Safari. Quite liked that font TBH.
Sir! Sir!! The font's changed again sir!
