Update: 10/31/05 NEW BOARDS ARE ONLINE AND READY FOR USE! http://silentgrief.proboards70.com SilentGrief.com Friends, It has been a difficult month for all of us, and we at SilentGrief.com certainly appreciate your patience as we've struggled to get our community boards back online. We tried to upgrade to a new system (not just software, but hosting solution as well) without giving up our past history of posts and user accounts. Unfortunately the solution that was best suited for us would not allow importing our existing database. So, we are now joyfully launching the SilentGrief.com Community Message Boards v2.0! You will need to sign up for a new account, and once you've done that, most things will function similar to what our old system did. There are a few new features that you can feel free to explore and experiment with. The graphics will not match the rest of the site yet--we are working on this, and as a result over the next few weeks you'll see little changes in the graphics start to appear. These changes will not affect the functionality--only the appearance. All of the old posts are still archived on our server, but we are unable to make them available in any way right now. There might be a time in the future where we can put them back online as a read-only feature, but we are unsure about it for now. Please go to the new boards, and continue praying that we'll grow as a community of friends and supporters in our time of grief as well as our time of healing. Sincerely, Joe Hinton, SilentGrief.com Programmer Clara Hinton, SilentGrief.com Founder p.s. Please spread the word--let's make this bigger and better than ever! Update: 10/22/05 Dear Friends, Thanks to all of you who have been emailing with suggestions and offers to help. Your response has been overwhelming--and quite humbling. Clara and I apologize for not being able to respond to each individual email, but we hope you will understand that it's been a hectic couple of weeks. We have been considering each suggestion, weighing every option for its immediate usefulness as well as the longevity of the solution. Although there have been some generous offers for server space (and many other things), we have decided that it's best to outsource the hosting to a company that specializes in free message board hosting (there will be small text ads placed at the top of the page to pay for the service). We will be making our final decision this weekend on which of these online services will provide the best support and quality of service for our needs. We fully expect to have the message boards back online in the next 2-4 days. We'll let you know more information as it becomes available. And as always, thanks for your prayers and for your patience! Sincerely, Joe Hinton Site Programmer Update: 10/18/05 Over the past week, we attempted to convert the SilentGrief.com Community Message Boards over to a new format (e.g. from UBB Classic to phpBB & MySQL). In doing so, we discovered just how vast the quantity of posts has become--nearly a half a million posts to convert! Because SilentGrief.com is run on donated server space and programming time, I've been serving the site from a shared server--which means limited storage space, processor allotments, and bandwidth. It also means that troubleshooting, new programming, security, etc. take place during my evenings and weekends, making the process a bit slow. As the site has grown, it has been obvious that a different hosting solution would be necessary to keep the site functioning properly. Unfortunately that time seems to have arrived right now. The attempt to convert the site to phpBB/MySQL is creating too heavy of a load on the shared server space. Right now, we are weighing our options. Our favorite is of course putting the site on its own dedicated server, but that costs money that isn't available. We are open to suggestions or help regarding this matter. We also ask for prayers that God will give guidance over the next few weeks as we determine the course of SilentGrief.com. Sincerely, Joe Hinton, Site Programmer (email: chinton@silentgrief.com) 9/27/05 The SilentGrief.com community message boards have been temporarily disabled. This became necessary when the main program (.cgi script) that runs the boards was exploited to send massive amounts of spam, eventually overloading the server and causing it to fail. In order to get the server back online, we had to completely disable the message boards. We are working to fix the problem and upgrade the system. This could take some time, but we assure you that it's being worked on as a priority. Sorry for the inconvenience, and we thank you for your patience. Sincerely, Clara Hinton, Site Founder Joe Hinton, Site Programmer