Hey there! We sadly lost one of our big database servers to disk failure on October 1 eve. We're working with our webhosts to bring it back online in the next four or five days, but the NaNoshow must go on! We spent the last 24 hours reconfiguring everything so we could try to relaunch with one database server instead of two.
Also, we're sad to say that the disk dying meant we lost a day's worth of new accounts and posts. Our most recent back-up was 9/30 at 1:15 AM. So if you created an account or made any changes after then, they've been lost and will need to be redone.
With only half our database arsenal in place, the site will be extremely slow, and the solitary database server may not be able to handle the load, in which case we'll need to take the site down until both big-gun database servers can work as a team again. But it was killing us to be dark in October, and we'd rather be slow (with occasional weird 'Cannot connect to database' errors) than not have anything up at all.
If you're just browsing the site, you can help keep the load on our database lighter by only signing in when you're ready to post something. Clicking on the "Customize Forums" link on your My NaNoWriMo page and unchecking forums you don't want to read will also save us precious data cycles.
Something not working right? Post a report about it in our bug reports forum!
Thanks for your patience everyone! This has been the less-fun kind of rollercoaster ride, but we'll get through it. And we're so, so excited about November!
Chris
NaNoWriMo