Since I first came to Beijing last year, the Beijing magazine and internet forum has been a great resource for finding information and for the occasional laugh.

From Friday it looks as though the forum has been locked with this message posted from the admin:

Hi all:

We’re closing the forums for a couple of weeks while we prepare for the relaunch of our website — this way our IT team can focus their efforts on the relaunch and not on trying to moderate all the crap that gets posted here.

Hope to see you in a few weeks!

I would have thought they would have waited until after the Olympics to do a site upgrade. The site is probably going to get the most traffic ever during the Olympic games.

Could they possibly be getting any heat from the government I wonder? Some of the discussions do get pretty crazy. In amongst all of the crazies though, there are some helpful people. Like many forums interesting discussions often turn into useless name calling, flames and trolls.