Do any of you remember college finals week? That hellacious end to every semester where you had to abandon your regular schedule of beer pong and start learning to solve differential equations? To this day, I still have recurring nightmares where I have a final in the morning but — for no apparent reason — I’ve never attended the class.

Clearly I digress, but that’s what this last week has felt like.

After learning that the vulnerability exploited in our forums was a zero-day at the time, and having dealt with a number of other security issues over the years with the forum, we had a real challenge on our hands. Then, out of the blue, I got an unsolicited email from Jase at Vanilla forums. Apparently quite a few people at Vanilla use Plex, and they noticed that our forum, well, fell down and couldn’t get up, like that one drunk uncle at your wedding.

We have years of old posts and attachments, we said. No problem, Vanilla said, we can import that. We need a clean SSO solution that’s easy to integrate, we said. No problem, Vanilla said. We need that yesterday, we said. Well, Vanilla said, we’re fresh out of time machines, but we’ll start right away.

Vanilla under-promised, over-delivered (all the while being super nice, why are Canadians so damn nice?!) and our little forum SWAT team at Plex worked straight through the holiday weekend and ridiculously long hours all week, testing, skinning, configuring, working closely the whole time with the Vanilla crew. (We will of course continue to tweak and improve as needed!)

I’m just so proud and happy to announce the grand re-opening of our brand new, deluxe, sexy, feature-rich forums. As you know, Plex has an amazing community, and the forums are really the heart and soul of that community. It’s where we trade pet photos, share tips, and help each other out. I’ve been on many forums, and I strongly believe we have the nicest, smartest, and of course best-looking group of people on the Internet!

One parting note: I know it’s been tough for you to be without forums for the last 10 days. We want to apologize to you all for that, sincerely. But we also want to take the opportunity to take a glass-half-full attitude and celebrate where we’ve ended up. Both the blog and forum (which were colocated on the compromised machine) are both hosted with external services now, and as a result run faster, with less maintenance, and more securely. And we really think you’re going to love these new forums!

We’ll leave you with, instead of a photo of Barkley, a photo of just one of the super cool features of the new forum: live search.