It isn’t just that PZ has managed to transfer most of the Pharyngula traffic here from ScienceBlogs. Well…okay, it is largely that. But it’s also Ed, and it’s Chris and Justin and….

Look, to tell the truth, it’s not us. It’s you. FreethoughtBlogs has an awful lot of readers, many of whom read several blogs. That is really, truly awesome…and we just weren’t prepared for it.

You’ve noticed the problems: posts disappearing back into draft status, comment counts not keeping up, occasional long load times. So tonight, in order to fix that, we’re moving to the beefiest server our host can manage. This means downtime. At 10 p.m. EST, FreethoughtBlogs will go away for a bit.

You’re just going to have to find something else to do with your Friday night, I’m afraid. The current estimate is three hours, but you know how these things go. Well, being married to an IT guy, I know how these things go.

You’ll also need to bear with us a bit as we discover problems and straighten them out. Report them in comments as you see them. Give us pages where they happen and browser information so we can duplicate the weirdness. We’ll pass it all along to our tech. Fair warning: We will insist that he sleeps some this weekend, so you may not see immediate fixes.

It will also take some time to find an appropriate level of caching, which we’ve been using to fight the lag times, in order to fix the original problems. We’re on it, though, because really, it is about you.