Digital Spy

Is it just my computer of has Digital Spy gone tits up this afternoon?

www.digitalspy.co.uk

Nope, still online.

Mines gone to pot as well

Thats OK then, not just me.

If you mean the forums, they will be offline all weekend for maintanence.

If you don't I'll appologise for the intrusion.

It seems the website style sheet has gone walk abouts on my machine.

The HTML loads but there is no formatting to the page, everything is standard text.

I believe they're upgrading the forum servers to cope with increased demand in time for Big Brother 8, and to add 'new features'. I'll die of shock if they add avatars and signatures. Although knowing what the DSBB forum is like, that can only be a bad thing.

I think the main purpose of the 'essential update' is to upgrade to the latest version of vBulletin, which they have definitely done considering the forum style reset earlier today and their customisations seems to have disappeared. Bearing in mind the size of the forum, the upgrade is anything but quick.

Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if the servers have had yet another upgrade. We'll have to see about the new features.

Ah ok, I assumed the two events were connected as the same has happened in previous years. I'm surprised an upgrade to the software is such a long job, unless the changes are so big the entire database also has to be altered.

As I see it, they have to run the upgrade, which could take time, and then possibly recount everything to make sure things aren't running out of sync (as seen here on TVF on older topics), which will take ages. Also, they have to set the style back up and put back in all their customisations.

I assume other changes are also being made with it being down all weekend. Earlier today it switched from the message generated by vBulletin to a standard message, so I assume the forum servers must have been down when that happened, suggesting an upgrade of some form to them. It could be a hardware upgrade, but I doubt it as they were upgraded not too long back. I wouldn't be surprised if it's other software upgrades, such as PHP, Apache Web Server, Linux, ect, as they would have gotten out of date with the time the forum servers have been running non-stop. All of these software updates will easily take the weekend.

DS is back this morning with a new version of vBulletin (which seems to include multi-quotes and other minor features).

And no signatures or avatars thankfully.

Anyone having problems getting onto DS and the DS Forums?