Good news: We’re upgrading Hornets247.com this weekend so it will be all super-fresh and ultra-fantastic in time for the new season. The design isn’t changing much, but we’ve got a bunch of new features ready to be unleashed and we’ll finally be waving goodbye to the slow-load problems.

Yay.

The bad news is that we may have some downtime while we’re making the changes, so please excuse any unintended craziness you might see over the next few days.

More bad news is that we’ll be asking many of you registered users to re-register after the launch. We couldn’t quite figure out how to automatically transfer all the user accounts between systems, so instead we manually transferred a select few. If you’ve ever posted a Journal here on the site, we’ve got you covered and you’ll be e-mailed your new password right after launch. To everyone else, our apologies for the inconvenience and thanks for understanding.

Just to reiterate: The site will likely be down for a while this weekend. We should be back up and running better than ever by Sunday evening. Follow us on Twitter for updates in the meantime.

And while I’m here, I guess I should explain my absence for the past few months. I’ve decided to leave the basketball writing behind and move on to my next life adventure. I’m saying goodbye to New Orleans after Thanksgiving and heading back to Europe. If you’d like to stay in touch, drop by my personal website or add me on Facebook. I’d love to hear from you.

Also, gotta say, even though my days of obsessing about the Hornets are over, I’m immensely proud of the community we’ve built here at Hornets247 over the years, and I expect that the new version of the site will help it become even better.

Rock on with your legendary selves.