The site was down for a good part of the weekend. Or more accurately, it appears that the non-Forum portion of the site was down. The two are more or less separate, which explains why people trying to get in through the home page were getting error messages and people accessing the forums via a direct URL were able to get in.
We had implemented significant system upgrades last Monday. You might have noticed some minor changes to the layout of some pages and the green navigation bar to the left, which we implemented as part of the upgrade.
Also, the upgrade resulted in changes to the URLs for some portions of the site; many URLs leading directly to specific articles within the site changed.
Of course, everything ran smoothly for the rest of the week until the weekend.....Our online tech folks have rebooted the site and are working on fixes to prevent this kind of crash in the future. We apologize for any distress this may have caused.
If you continue to notice problems with the home page or other pages within the site, drop me a line.
The bright side is that at least it happened on the weekend: Imagine trying to get through a day at work without periodic spirits-lifting visits to FineScale.com! [:0]