Let’s get this started because I bet someone will ask anyway.
Do you guys not know when the entire site is going to need its database updated? If you do, it would be nice to be told.
Of course, I can understand it being some sort of emergency or something otherwise unexpected. If you don’t mind, I’d be interested in knowing what happened.
I had no prior knowledge of this event. I can only assume it was an unscheduled maintenance event on the main Straight Dope site, which also affected the SDMB.
Sorry for the downtime. Everything seems to be working fine now.
I checked with Jerry. He hadn’t gotten any notices, but remembered that a hardware upgrade had been scheduled for the Chicago Reader site, which shares some resources with us. Our provider must have shut down everything for a while. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Oddly, though, there seem to have been a few posts during that time. So apparently it didn’t affect everyone, or there was some (possibly accidental) way around it.