At the moment it would seem like the forum upgrade will begin in 24 hours, approximately 8 AM (GMT+2) saturday morning. Grognards have not reported any bugs or problems, so far so good. an0n suggested we should have porn in the forums though, but that's kind of unlikely to happen. It has been confirmed that compatible HLP theme won't be finished by the time, so the forums will be using default SMF 1.1 theme until updated HLP theme is finished. Old VWBB lurkers will get some déja vu vibes, so be mentally prepared.
Also, our forums have multiple modifications installed which have allowed us to use features such as enhanced quick-reply box, small project avatars under names and custom bb codes. These won't be available at least initially, the main reason for this is that most of these modifications have not been updated to be 1.1 RC2 compatible. The modifications are very likely updated as soon as the final version of SMF 1.1 is released. Enhanced quick-reply box has been updated but probably won't be installed unless people really can't live without it.
You gain some, you lose some. I believe this is a viable tradeoff to get you the search back, as well as a number of other minor enhancements that probably won't be noticeable by regular forumites but well worth it.
If you are wondering why we are upgrading to 1.1 RC2 which is not yet final version and won't have good modification support, not to mention we haven't had the time to update the HLP theme. The most important reason is naturally the search, which has been gone long enough. And there has been no news as to when we can expect the final version of 1.1 to be released, could be days, weeks or months. Third reason is that we would have to upgrade the forums anyway, either to the latest 1.0.x or to the 1.1 RC2. Neither solution is perfect and would leave us without something quite useful, in the end 1.1 RC2 was chosen. We can only hope the majority of the forumites feel the same, but as always, it will be impossible to please everyone.
As for the GoogleAds problem mentioned above, to cut the long story short; Sandwich's Google AdSense account was suspended after Google caught HLP generating invalid clicks on the ads shown. This is most likely direct result of about 10 forumites going clicking-spree nearly two weeks ago. Their intentions were obviously good and nobody expected this to happen. Hopefully Sandwich can sort out the issue and get his account back.
