Short version:

Gotta turn off Kind Words for a few hours to update the server. Also, there's a small, fun update to the game coming soon.

Long version:

If you've been following along with our folksy little updates all these years, you may be familiar with this theme: We didn't expect Kind Words to be popular and I didn't design the server thinking lots of people would actually use it. That caused some growing pains for all of us. A few years ago I started rewriting the server for better performance and extensibility. I don't want to jinx it, but I've actually tested the new server for high loads unlike when we launched the current one. It's going to take a few hours to do the upgrade because our database is around 7 gigabytes in size and I don't want to lose any of your messages. So first I'm gonna backup the existing database, which takes about a half hour. Then I need to convert the database to my totally redesigned format. That should take about an hour. Let's assume something will go wrong, double that and add a little and I'm estimating 4 hours. Boy do I hope nothing goes wrong. The best thing about this server update is that it will let us do some new things with the game. And I know that everyone longs to open steam to be greeted by a monologue about server upgrades, so to thank you for your attention, I'm going to reward you with a tease for our next game update: we're adding a "favorites" system so you can curate your own little collection of the kindest of words.