Dear MS community,

as some of you will have noticed, we had an extended maintenance downtime today. This was to push a huge under-the-hood update that we’ve been working on for pretty much a whole year. We decided not to give you a heads-up this time so as to not clutter our news feeds with too much site- and not metal-related content. We want our news section to be mainly about metal and not so much about Metal Storm.

The site you’re now visiting is pretty much still the old one. There are a few noticeable changes like re-working the login and registration system and some smaller updates here and there. Under the hood, however, we’ve changed a lot. Most of that relates to the way the database is handled. This also means that you’ll see new bugs or changed behavior. We did a lot of testing in the background but there is only so much we can do with the team size we have and still operate the live site.

So we decided to push the update live at a point where we are pretty satisfied with the experience and accept the possibility that it might explode on us because we missed something big. This means there's an increased chance for you to find parts of the site that don't work as expected or end up on a white page in general. At this point in our upgrade path that's pretty much unavoidable. We're making good progress with the updates but the original code is still very old and error-prone.

Everything we missed, you can report in the new January 2023 Update Bugs thread and we’ll look into it.

We’ll continue to work on the site, both under the hood and new features and functions. If you want to help, please contact a staffer of your choice. We are looking to build a small team of volunteer testers soon.