Important message:
The forums will be migrated in the near future to new software. The reason, as many of you know, is this software is no longer supported in a technical sense, and I want to get onto another system where we will have support if things go wrong.
For the most part, we will take with us current content including our discussions which already exist. However, the private message function is based on a plugin, as many of you know is a bit quirky (and provided as-is) and as such, we will be starting fresh. Existing PMs will not be migrated.
If you have private messages, please back them up any that you want to save. One easy way to do this is to open your text editor or word processor of choice, start a new document, open the PM you want to save, copy and paste. If you paste PMs you want to save to one document, you should end up with a text searchable document.
In most cases, PMs probably aren't worth saving, but this should help in those cases where they are (e.g. you are the lucky recipient of a PM from Big Dummy).
I wanted to alert you to this well in advance of the change -- especially since some of our users don't log in very often. My apologies for any inconvenience and please feel free to ask questions below.
Update 8/15:
The move to new software isn't imminent. (We upgraded the current system and moved to a -- hopefully -- more reliable host, so we will be on this software a bit longer.)
However, it may happen in a month or more with fairly short notice, so you should be aware PMs may disappear in the near future and backing them up offline is not a bad idea if you want to retain them.