Those of you who tried to access the forum between now and Saturday will already know that it was down. Basically, some things went wrong with the update and the database was corrupted - that's the bit with all your posts, usernames, passwords and the like, so it's pretty important. Fortunately it's so important that I made a backup before I started the update - in fact, I wasn't completely sure the backup had worked, so I made two. They were both corrupt.
To cut a long story short, we fixed it with some SQL magic and a lot of help from our host Mike. We came close to losing the lot; we were lucky the backups had the bits that were missing from the old database, and vice versa. The database is now on a server I own, which allows me access to a full set of database tools including more reliable backup software. I'm considering moving the entire forum to my server sometime in the new year, but it's early days yet and I have to look into some things before we get round to any of that.
I'd like to say thank you all for being so patient - and to the few of you who called our complaints line with words of encouragement, that's not what it's for. But it was definitely appreciated.
As always, if anybody spots anything not working after the update please let us know by posting it here on in the suggestions thread (see my signature for a link), or by PM if you feel the need.
Thanks again,
- Owen
Original post about the updates:
Spoiler:
Just to let you know I'm scheduling forum downtime at noon my local time (UTC/GMT) on Saturday to apply the latest update to the board's phpBB software. 
