ID4 Downtime 4-5 July

To mark Independence Day in the USA, a gigantic alien battleship now hovering above the SF Encyclopedia will reduce our website to plasma with its coruscating beams of ravening destruction. This is laughably known as system maintenance and will take the SFE offline from about 8am on Saturday 4 July to about 6pm on Sunday 5 July (estimated times only). The SF Gateway site will likewise become a finely divided residue of glowing particulate matter.

Pages and features hosted at the editors’s site [now incorporated into the main site] will remain available. These include What’s New, On This Day and the ever-growing Picture Gallery (now approaching 14,000 images), though their links to main-site entries will fail during the downtime period.

Another small landmark: on 1 July the SF Encyclopedia text reached and passed the 4.9 million word mark. The once unbelievably remote goal of five million words seems ever more possible ...