Tuesday evening Pacific Time (that’s tonight for me, tomorrow for some of you) the OpenForum will be down for a pretty tasty upgrade as we move from 2.2.4 to 2.3 beta. This new version requires large scale reorganization of the database tables, which in our case hold almost 3.5 million posts, so the OpenForumwill not be available for several hours. Yes, the pain, the suffering. But it will be worth it.
Might I suggest that you satiate your withdrawal cravings withOpenIRCinstead? As you may or may not know, Ars has its own IRC server, and at any given time there’s usually around 300 folks on it, throughout the various channels. We recommend that you access the server (irc.arstechnica.com) using an IRC client such asmIRC(windows),BitchX(various platforms), orsome such, but if you just want to see what’s up, you can use our genericJava clients. If you’re totally new to IRC, readour little intro. Once on the server, you can do a /list to see the various channels. The main channel is #arstechnica, but there’s plenty of action in other channels as well. But heed my advice: IRC culture is weird. Very. Weird. :)
