Scheduled Forum Downtime - 10/10

[Sparky]

Okay, like it or not, we need to upgrade to the newest version of vBulletin, which will necessitate me turning the forum off until the upgrade is complete. Having never done an upgrade before, I can't tell you how long that will be exactly in hours. Hopefully it will only be a matter of hours, and not days. Seriously, I've never done this before. I have seen forums go down for days for an upgrade, so I really can't say. Of course, I'll try and get it back up as quickly as I can. Expect the forum to go down by noon, PST, on October the 10th, which is Tuesday. I will run a forum backup before I begin. If there are any major problems, look for a note from me on the main page of fosters-home.com.

Now, I do expect that we will lose our current skin, the "Best Friends" one, and we will probably have to use something non-Foster's themed for a while. The Best Friends skin's template is actually for an earlier version of vBulletin than we are using now, and though you guys wouldn't know about it, the system does have conflicts and I think some things aren't displaying properly with the Best Friends skin. I'll try to make sure I work with a template from the newest version before customising it this time.

Also, we may lose some of the customisations I've made, like to the postbit for example, but I will try and get those things working again as soon as possible. I don't know how many things are preserved between upgrades.

edit: Looks like I need to update Flashchat as well, so I'll do that at the same time.