Originally Posted by cthree,Sep 22 2009, 11:12 AM

The site will be offline for most of this coming weekend to do a major conversion of the forums database from the current single-byte latin1/iso-8859-1 character set to the multi-byte/unicode/utf-8 character set. It's a very long and tedious process that will take the database offline for many hours and that is if it all goes well on the first try.

The good news is that when it comes back online on Sunday(?) nothing will have changed and you'll notice no difference at all but it will make my life a whole lot easier

Just one of those things that needs to be done and that I have been dreading for years. Hopefully it will be relatively quick and painless.

Sorry for the outage. It's not something that I want to do but I have little choice anymore. It just can't be worked-around or procrastinated any longer.