As you may have seen, Ultimate Central is no longer called Ultimate Central. THe move has been a long time coming and has been discussed endlessly, but we've finally pulled the trigger and changed our name to The Comic Board! Not only does this broaden our scope to all comics, but it helps disassociate us from the mess that is the Ultimate Universe, made worse by the recent bombs Ultimates 3 and Ultimatum. Would you want to be associated with those abominations?

Visit us at www.thecomicboard.com and join in the discussion of any of hundreds of comic titles, characters, and stories, as well as TV, movies, books, music, and much more!

The 2009 edition of the annual Ultimate Central Awards is open for
voting. Vote for your favorite comic writers, characters, books, and
storylines now through April 13th.

Click here: Ultimate
Central Awards 2009

We've got a new policy on comic book and comic story discussion, specifically as it relates to starting new threads. As we move away from the Ultimate imprint and as the industry as a whole moves more and more toward graphic novels and trade paperback collections, we ask that threads are separated by story arc. This includes the Ultimate imprint, which was separated previously by issue.

For more information, click here.

As always, you can get site news and updates via Twitter.

We've started a Twitter profile for the SMACKBOMB.com network for news updates, server outage notices, and general musings as they relate to sites in the SMACKBOMB.com network.

Follow us to keep in the know: www.twitter.com/smackbomb.

We've decided to get rid of the Comic News forum, as it became painfully obvious that we are not, in fact, a comics news site. The forum will be removed soon, but in the meantime we have changed the front page of the site to show the last 15 most recently updated relevant threads. Relevant, I say, because it only displays updated threads from the comics, movie, and TV forums - not any of the off-topic forums. This will give visitors a good gauge of what we are talking about and should ensure a steady supply of fresh blood.

The posting of news is always welcome, it will just stay confined to the appropriate forum rather than an all-encompassing news forum. If you are posting breaking news about a change on an Avengers title, for example, just put it in the Avengers forum like always. The only difference is that it will stay there permanently rather than be moved by a mod.

You might have noticed that the Ultimate Central forum isn't working quite right today. The biggest issue is that it's not possible to view forums, and therefore users are unable to post new threads.

We'll be taking the site down tonight sometime around 10PM to midnight EST (-5 GMT) to do some upgrades which will fix the problem. The downtime will be around a half hour or so.

After a long day of downtime, Ultimate Central is back up and running.

Thanks for your patience.

Just a few major server glitches going on right now. We should be back up and running shortly.

And we're back up and running. Thanks for your patience, if in fact you were being patient.

Yep, all of SMACKBOMB.com's sites are down and have been since just before noon EST. We're waiting for word on when they'll be back.