We’ve spent months getting ready, and tonight (around 1 am ET on Wednesday) we’re flipping the switch on a major upgrade to our community platform, which supports both article comments and the OpenForum. We won’t be losing any data, and you won’t need to set up a new account or change your password. You will have to wait a few hours, though, and for that we’re sorry!

We anticipate that both systems will remain offline until around Wednesday afternoon as we process our massive 22 years of comments (that’s 1 million topics and more than 28 million posts). All logins and user registration functions will be unavailable during this time. That means no article comments, no forum browsing, and unfortunately, it also means subscribers will not be able to access their sub benefits for a brief time. We’ll make it as short as possible. When it’s done, just log in again with your old credentials and you’re set.

For more detail on what we’re doing and why, keep reading.