Putting your forum offline

[Bejay]

When do you do this? Do you do it when you are adding a small MOD or when??? I have only had to turn it off when I was upgrading the forums.

 

[CyberFreak]

I only ever turn a forum offline when doing an update. I get annoyed by people when the disable their board for a week to add a new style. It is quite silly to be honest as any activity they had will be lost.

 

[David]

I've turned it off once, but I only had like 10 members. I was doing a board update of the forums.

 

[Bossanova]

My forum doesn't go "offline", just in maintenance mode where only staff can login. I only put it in mm when I'm fixing big codes, editing the default skin, or rearranging the boards/categories.

 

[DarkRaven]

I only turn my forum offline when I move servers or when I run an update. Otherwise it's just pointless.

 

[Tsuna]

I only put my forum offline when doing a huge update. 🙂

 

[Ascent]

My forum only goes offline if I'm doing something huge, like a massive software upgrade, or re-designing the site as a whole.

 

[ADragon]

i had to mine of for like 2 days and gave everyone a 3 week warning before i did it so i could do a major make over and add mods and change the style

 

[Fergal]

Thee are times when a forum must be taken offline. However, keep the downtime as short as possible, so that you don't lose members. Give your members notice that you will be going offline and post a note on your site, during the down time, to say when you expect to be back online.

 

[cityStatic]

I have only gone offline twice. Both times were because of large updates to the forum, which I gave a notice to a week ahead of time. 🙂

 

[hcfwesker]

I think I did it once. During when imageshack got hacked, or something. all my hosted images became those huge white imageshack boxes.

So i put the forum offline for about an hour or two, while i uploaded all my images to another image host site.