Service Announcement - Avatars may not load properly over the next few hours.

As part of a server load balance upgrade (which we've been doing in the background as we're now over 92,000 forums with 10.5 million posts), avatars in your forum may not load for the next few hours.  This is due to a DNS caching issue and so it may affect some people, but not others.

What is DNS? For a full understanding, you can read the wikipedia article on the Domain Name System.  The simple way to explain it, is that DNS is the phone book for the internet.  So when your computer tries to connect to a website, say lefora.com, it looks in a phone book, gets the phone number, and heads there.  The avatars on lefora have there own address outside of your forum so that they can be loaded independently and quickly.  However, at the moment, the new location of the avatar servers are being updated in phone books around the world, so it may take up to a full day for your computer to connect to the most current phonebook.

We apologize for any confusion or inconvenience this may cause on your forum. We try to keep server interruptions to a bare minimum (we don't like them any better then you do.)  

photo courtesy of icanhascheezburger