What is the problem, why is it needed?
Being a part of OSL[1] data centre forums.gentoo.org relies on their
backend database servers, which already have been upgraded to MySQL
v5. We need to follow now and have forums.gentoo.org lifted up to v5
too.

What will be done?
The database will be shutdown and backed up. After some final
consistency checks the migration procedures to the new database
backend will be executed. If nothing unforseen will happen finally the
conversion to full UTF-8 support is the last step.
In order to have the needed steps done in the most quickest way the
forums administrators decided to shutdown the forums during this time.

When will this happen?
This activity will most likely be started at 2007-09-08 and will take
approximately 48 hours. The actual status will be regularly updated
and shown on this status page[2].

What if anything goes wrong?
The admins did some extensive tests in prior to find all possible
pitfalls. Most of them are already solved, some others need some more
tuning before we can start.
It can be possible though that some (very) few posts are not converted
correctly or usernames with special characters will not be able to
login any longer. For the later please send an email to
forum-mods@gentoo.org and we will sort that out case by case - please
be aware that there might be the need to have your user name changed.

Further Information
For further questions before and after the conversion, please take a
look at this thread [3] in Gentoo Forums Feedback. As it won't be
available during the conversion, please visit the status page [2]
during that time or feel free to drop by on IRC in #gentoo-forums on freenode.

[1] http://osuosl.org/
[2] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/forums/forum-downtime200709.xml
[3] http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-578773.html

-- 
Tom Knight
tomk@gentoo.org
GPG Public Key: http://dev.gentoo.org/~tomk/tomk.asc