Hi all!
If you ever come to the forums and see a message “This site is in read only mode” it means Discourse (the forum software) is running a backup of the forum database. It can take some time, its automatic, sometimes annoyingly slow, but there is no need to get worried.
Edit: yes, we pay about 8 usd a month to make sure our valuable chitchat here gets constantly backed up 
While I think of it, are you aware that the Discourse version is out of date?
I’m presuming there’s a good reason for it.
We can rest assured knowing all your gifs are safely backed up. :P
its been out of date since prety much since the start, but if it aint broke or something
Yes I know. I’ve started to do the backup manually to update the Discourse, then it has run for so long I have aborted 
Ok guys, now that we know the backup has recently been done, I’ll press update later today.
Going to read only / down for update soon