What happened to the site today? For the longest time, all I got was a page with a sentence in several languages. My Esperanto wasn't good enough to translate the sentence (I think it said something about the page being down for maintenance, but I'm not sure), and there was no English translation. I just now was able to get on!

I've also wanted to use the Instant Messenger, but I've tried everything, and it still doesn't work. I've looked at the help pages, I've clicked the blue button, and nothing. Did I do something to make it not work, or what?

The esperanto message did read, like you said, something to the effect of:

There is work occuring on the page currently, and it may not be reachable for a while. Hopefully, it will be up again soon.

Thats all i got...

Actually, translated text in lernu.net needs voluntary translation. I think that message was "available for translation" too late, and the English translators didn't make it in time. (Not that it is difficult to translate, maybe the translators just had a common day off. )

If anyone there feels able and wants to be a vonluteer translator, contact the staff!

(Sorry for poor English!)

POOR ENGLISH?! That was amazingly good! I was shocked when I read that. Very natural English.

An update on the instant messenger situation - the code for the messenger will be different for the new site than for the old one, that's why it's not running on the new site yet. Very soon (possibly tomorrow) the old site will be taken offline. It's wreaking havoc with our database to have both the new site and the old site accessing it, because if someone is using the old site and changes their information in the database, it gets input wrong and someone has to go in and manually fix it. This is driving our programmers crazy and they have been petitioning the rest of the lernu! team to take the old site offline asap, so they can focus their attentions 100% on the new site.

Regarding the translation of the error message - sorry about that! I do the English translations, and that particular phrase was posted to the system while I was attending the ELNA Landa Kongreso in New York. I didn't have access to a computer and I didn't get home from my travels until Wednesday, by which time it was too late to do anything about it.