[update] We’re back up! And earlier than I expected — turns out Jon’s really good. :>

I’ve just learned from our hosting system administrator (also known as our friend Jon) that he needs to do some emergency maintenance on our server boxes later today.

Basically this means that all my sites — Mania’s Arcania, the new WoW Petopia Community forums, Petopia, and Warcraft Mounts — will be down for a couple of hours this evening.

Unfortunately, because of the type of maintenance he needs to do, I won’t be able to have any sort of useful message up while this is happening, so anyone who wanders in during the maintenance will only see that the sites are down. So if you see someone freaking out, please let then know that we’ll be back up in an hour or two.

The sites will be going down around 5pm EST and should be back up by 8pm EST. Thanks for bearing with us through this!

Rumor has it that the Friends & Family alpha for Cataclysm, the next expansion to World of Warcraft, is about to begin.

A Friends & Family alpha is, as the name implies, a very early mostly private build of the game that is shared with friends and family of the development team only. For most MMO products, this is the first time a build will be available outside the company, and in fact for some companies this will be the first time that company employees who aren’t directly involved with the new product will see it.

In other words, you and I aren’t getting in. *grin*

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You can now find a fairly full-featured forum for the discussion of WoW hunter pets on Petopia! Just visit forums.wow-petopia.com.

My plans: I originally started the Arcania forums attached to this blog so that you guys would have somewhere to chat when I wasn’t posting. That worked out pretty well, except that I choose my forum software poorly^* and the location was a bit off the beaten path — hard to find for the average Petopia user who just wanted to know what was going on with pets. The new Petopia forums should fix both problems.

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