[Announce] forums.gentoo.org leaves the web

[think4urs11]

What is the problem, why is it needed?
Beeing a part of OSL data centre forums.gentoo.org relies on their backend database servers, which already have been upgraded to MySQL v5. We need to follow now and have forums.gentoo.org lifted up to v5 too.

What will be done?
The database will be shutdown and backed up. After some final consistency checks the migration procedures to the new database backend will be executed. If nothing unforseen will happen finally the conversion to full UTF-8 support is the last step.
In order to have the needed steps done in the most quickest way the forums administrators decided to shutdown the forums during this time.

When will this happen?
This activity will most likely be started at 2007-09-08 and will take approximately 48 hours. The actual status will be regularly updated and shown on this status page.

What if anything goes wrong?
The admins did some extensive tests in prior to find all possible pitfalls. Most of them are already solved, some others need some more tuning before we can start.
It can be possible though that some (very) few posts are not converted correctly or usernames with special characters will not be able to login any longer. For the later please send an email to forum-mods@gentoo.org and we will sort that out case by case - please be aware that there might be the need to have your user name changed.

Further Information
For further questions before and after the conversion, please take a look at this thread in Gentoo Forums Feedback. As it won't be available during the conversion, please visit the status page during that time or feel free to drop by on IRC in #gentoo-forums on freenode.
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[tomk]

bump.
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