Thanks everyone, it looks like Chicken Smoothie made it through the storm without a problem, so we've closed down our down.chickensmoothie.com backup site for now
Hurricane Sandy is closing in on the East Coast of the US, and we hope that everybody is staying safe and is prepared!
Unfortunately, the Chicken Smoothie server is also stored on the East Coast, right in the path of the storm. That means that it's likely that this website will be (temporarily) knocked offline sometime in the next few days.
The last time this happened to CS, we ended up having to restore a backup which was a day old, meaning that all of the forum activity and pet adoption / trading for that day got forgotten. But this time we're prepared, and are using a new backup strategy that we hope will lose nothing at all if CS gets hit by a storm! So you don't need to worry about your activity being rewinded by a day . Our backups are safely out of the way over on the West coast of the US, and tend to be only a couple of seconds out of date.
We have set up an alternate website so that everybody has a place to chat while we work to bring CS back online . It has a forum and an Oekaki to keep us occupied. Registration of new accounts on the site is disabled, but if you have a CS account here then you will be able to use that account to log in on the temporary site. When CS comes back online, the posts and drawings you made on our temporary site will be moved over to the CS main site .
So please bookmark this address, which you can use if CS ever goes down:
http://down.chickensmoothie.com/
(those forums are locked until we need them)
Here's a weather map: