Slippery When Wet —

Temporary shutdown of Ars comments and logins for upgrades

It's upgrade time! Be patient.

This is a heads up to our late-night and international readers: we're temporarily shutting down commenting (on both front page articles and in the forum) and logging in tonight to perform some DB upgrades. You'll still be able to read existing comments and forum posts, but you won't be able to post your own.

Because we have to disable logins that also means there will be a short window when our subscribers will see banner ads and lose their special sub privileges. Sorry, we'll make it as quick and painless as possible!

The shutdown will occur at approximately 11pm CDT (that's 4am GMT), extending to probably 2am CDT or so. Don't be alarmed if it takes a little longer, these are just estimates.

We'll have more details about what these upgrades are, and what they mean for our readers later. Thanks for your patience.

Update 3am CDT: Looks like it's going to take longer than we hoped. At this point it's more important to get it right than to rush, so we're going to just let the process take its course. If logins are still locked out while you're reading this we apologize for the inconvenience.

Channel Ars Technica