As you might have observed, over the past year both D3hoops.com and D3football.com have suffered occasional slowdowns, times at which one site or the other would move at a crawl because of high traffic.

We attempted to alleviate that in February by moving Posting Up onto a separate server within the same host. While that worked, it was only a temporary measure — we have more planned.

Unfortunately, our message board software itself, which we have been using since Posting Up opened in November 1998, is part of the problem. Although we love Discus because it was written by programmers associated with Hope College, we have outgrown it and it can not support a site of our size.

To this end, we’re changing message board software. We’re also combining Posting Up with Post Patterns, and we’re putting the combined message board on a separate server. We believe this will make both D3hoops.com and D3football.com run more smoothly all year.

The new board will also have more modern features, the types of things you’re used to if you use forums on other sites. Your username and password will carry over to the new site and we’ll transfer the posts. To this end, we’re temporarily shutting down new user registration effective immediately, and will shut down the entire board sometime on Saturday evening before the transfer. When all is complete we’ll put up the new link.

If you are registered for both Posting Up and Post Patterns, we are attempting to determine that now so we can combine them into one account, with one post total. We’ll attempt to use your password from Post Patterns, since that sport is more active at the moment.