Scheduled downtime for Groundviews

Groundviews will be down tomorrow, 10th April, for a scheduled upgrade. The site should be up and running as normal by 11th April the latest, but we don’t really expect it to be inaccessible for anything more than a few hours at most.

For the geeks out there, we are upgrading our back-end content management system to the latest version of WordPress (2.5), which strengthens security and adds some neat features to help authors publish their content more easily.

We’ve also disabled site registration – we hope temporarily. An unusual amount of bot accounts terminating with mail.ru or ukr.net (with IP’s unsurprisingly terminating in Russia) flooded the site recently and with a resulting increase in comment spam that became tedious to manage. Until we figure out a solution to keep world exclusive Britney Spears without underwear videos, cheap Viagra ads and graphic descriptions of trophy wives from Moscow away from the site, registrations will be halted.

Even without site registration, once Groundviews is back online, you can leave comments, read all the articles and subscribe to our email updates (highly recommended).