As many of you may have noticed, there have been a few outages recently on the TacticalGamer.com web site. This is something I have been working on addressing over the past month but the outage today has really pushed this to critical status.

TG has continued to grow at a steady rate and that has certainly taken its toll on both performance and overall capability. As a result this is necessitating a few changes that will, unfortunately, need to take place very rapidly.

To start; TG is going to get a new primary web server. When this new web server comes online, I am going to be RAPIDLY migrating the site over to it. This migration is not just going to be a new server but new back end software as well. The new software will bring a number of improvements in both efficiency and functionality as drastically reduce the number of third-party modules we need to support various services.

During this migration the design of the site will be changing as well as the layout. A new content management system will be deployed and some of the existing functionality will be changing.

Here's what you need to know:

It is VERY likely that the blogging system will need to be restarted. I realize that its not a very popular feature, but I want to give those of you that DO use the system enough notice to copy any important content you have in your blogs so you can re-add it to the new system.

When the new site goes live, the user interface is going to look different. I am going to work as fast as I can to get it up to par; but I would really appreciate patience during this time to allow me to get things back to normal.

When the new site goes live, the IP address is going to change. This will result in some people not being able to access the new site immediately. I am going to do everything I can to eliminate this delay by reducing the TTL values for our DNS records. Just remember, the "ipconfig /releasedns" command may be your friend during this time. If you can't access TG, make sure you close all your browser windows, run that command in a DOS prompt, and then try again. If that doesn't work, it may take an hour or two for your ISP to cache the new DNS records.

Once again, I apologize for all of this and I've been trying for a while now to work on this in the background and not affect users, but I would rather risk some visual unpleasantness with the site for a couple days than risk losing data and extended downtime.

Planned maintenance is always better than unplanned maintenance!!

I will update THIS thread as this process progresses. Remember. It's going to be rapid!!!!!!