[Alex Pepple]

Those of you who tried must have noticed that the Sphere was down since late last night until just a few minutes from now (~4:30 PM PST). Well, I've been in an epic struggle with the manual migration to the new server because nothing that was supposed to work was working: the database was very large, but that alone shouldn't have been a problem, except that the system kept throwing database errors at the data in the new environment, and the automatic data migration was broken just because it didn't like some of the Sphere data, and I was stuck with figuring out how to do it manually, etc. etc. Suffice it to say, it was touch and go there for a long time to the point where I thought I might have to restore the site from a very old backup several years old (because that was the only backup that the new server didn't throw errors at). But, I think we're over the hump now, and things should keep getting better from here. I'm not sure if everything is back to normal, though, because the site had been behaving oddly as far as logging in and staying logged in goes. So, go and ahead and brave your way in, and hopefully, the down times from here on will be at the minimum.

And I should mention some good news in parting, that I did successfully manage to transfer over everything with absolutely no data loss. So, you should see everything that you entered up until when I brought down the server last night for this rather hairy migration task!

Cheers,
...Alex