Yes, forums were wiped -- and unfortunately, we have no backups. I couldn't believe it either; but, it is what it is. After I finished kicking myself in the rear for not keeping proper backups, I've managed to put up a new forum. Yeah, it sucks... but look at the bright side.

Wiping/losing the board DID give us a chance for an easy upgrade path to the new Invision Power Board (released today). It gives us quite a few new features. Expect a lot of tweaks and changes as Invision irons out the bugs with their new forum software. Also, as the development community starts bringing their own mods into this new version, we'll go through revisions of improving/modding/skinning the board.

Meanwhile, anyone familiar with forum skinning, we could potentially develop our own skin. While it isn't a priority, let me know if you're interested.

Note: If you were a moderator for our forum previously, please contact any GM to start the process of restoring your status. Being a moderator previously does NOT garuntee tha you will become a moderator. We are attempting to make moderator status more of an "official" part of the team. We are not currently interested in recruiting new moderators. An opportunity to join the moderating staff may become available once the old moderator staff has been selected and restored.

The Ethereal Staff is undergoing some much needed revision. We are pleased to announce new GMTs, and a new Head Support GM. Please see the staff page on our website to get a up-to-date list of the GM Team.

Please refrain from asking the existing GM staff to become from being a GM. We are currently not seeking new applicants.

We have made great efforts to better manage and enable our development team. Although we are still in the process of streamlining our processes, we hope to restart development efforts soon. Recently, we have started a number of projects:

1. Website
2. Bug-fixes (not features!) in eAthena
3. Client updates via Patcher

If you are interested in participating in any of these projects, please keep your eye on the forums for an opportunity. As our infrastructure stabilizes, we will be asking for help and participation from the community.

The Ethereal-Discovery server is as alive as ever! Admittedly, we have had more than our share of problems -- we are still dedicated to creating the best gaming environment for our players.

We are planning a migration into a more up-to-date version of the eAthena servers. We have already run one MySQL stability test to ensure that our migration is as painless as possible. Expect more beta servers to pop up and down over time as our migration date comes near.