Upcoming Board Upgrade & Maintenance

Hey everyone! I'm excited to let you know that our board upgrade is almost here. This upgrade will include both an overhaul of the board's software and the introduction of the new design as discussed in in this thread. During the course of the upgrade, the board will be taken completely offline, but I will post a link to a temporary chat room so people can still talk. The estimated time frame for this upgrade is Sunday - Monday for a few hours, depending on my schedule this weekend.

Preparing for the Upgrade

For the most part, this process is completely out of your guys' control. But, there are a handful of things that you can do to help prepare!

• Make backups of everything: your profile information, your threads, your graphics. All of this will be transferred, but it never hurts for you to have your own backups.
• All alerts will be deleted. In order to upgrade the alert system, all of our alerts will need to be deleted. So check in at least once over the weekend and keep note of what you've been tagged in so when the board reopens, you know.
• Custom Profile Skins. Since the design of the board changed, custom profile skins will no longer work. They will be temporarily removed, but will still be accessible from your user control panel. Once I have written up a guide to skin for the new design, we will allow you to use your custom profile skins again.
• Skin Drive! We are accepting new skins for the new board. The new format for skin images is as follows: at least 1500px wide with faded left and right sides and should be between 300-600px high. You do not need to include "ruins of Wildwood" on the image.
• We already have a lot of nice skins, but many of them will need to be cropped and edited to work with the new design. If you don't mind us reusing, and necessarily editing, a skin we currently have now, please let us know.
• Board Cleanup: I will take the time during the upgrade to prune old user accounts with no posts (excluding adoptables) and will be pruning all PMs older than 6 months. You can backup your PMs here.

I think that's about it. I want to say thank you for all of your patience up until this point and all of your patience as we move ahead over the upcoming weekend and the next week. Myself, Grey, Rachel, and Namara have done our best to bug test, but we appreciate your understanding as inevitably new ones will popup once we've made the upgrade.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to ask!