[Savage]

Welcome, moderators and early arrivals.

There will be about 30 moderators total (2 per forum), and all of them were notified by email today. About half have already set up their accounts, and I'll be promoting them to moderator status soon.

If all goes well, I'll announce the forums publicly in the blog on Friday. Over the next couple days, I'll be tweaking the forum layout and options and installing a plug-in or two, so don't get too attached to the current structure. Most likely I'll add some additional navigational links and some ads, but I plan to keep the ads here fairly moderate (i.e. no ads intermingled with the individual threads and posts). Don't be alarmed if there's some intermittent downtime over the next couple days -- it shouldn't last long.

In the meantime everything is essentially operational, so if you want to start up some new topics in any of the forums, feel free. Just don't expect much of a discussion until the doors officially open.

Tweaking these forums will probably be a never-ending task, but my main goal is to finish the essentials in order to launch by Friday.

I'm excited to see what kind of community develops here.