You may have noticed the announcement posted May 1 (or if you didn't, I'd like you to see it) that system maintenance will occur from May 9 - 12. During that maintenance window, VMware Communities will be available read-only, and you will be unable to login to your account or access any functions like posting content or replies that require login. You will also be unable to access or manage your VMware account; submit support requests online; download, purchase or register VMware products; or manage VMware product licenses.
The reason for the outage is to upgrade some functions of VMware Store to a more robust platform. We are not making any changes to VMware Communities directly, except for the login / logout / manage profile function that previously relied on VMware Store and now will use the new infrastructure. From the standpoint of a VMware Communities participant, the change should be mostly transparent -- you may notice some cosmetic changes when you log in, but the process will be the same.
Once this maintenance is complete, we will start in the next few weeks to make improvements to the VMware Communities user experience. We have been working with Akamai on a new configuration that will allow full caching of guest content. This will improve performance for guests (site visitors who are not logged in) because all guest pages (except for cache misses, of course) will be served by Akamai without having to go back to our servers. And it will improve logged in performance by offloading most guest traffic from our origin servers and by increasing the cacheability of logged-in pages. We expect to complete testing of this configuration in the next few weeks, so I will blog again when this is ready to roll out.
Following the performance improvements, we will next roll out the 2-column design that simplifies the layout of VMware Communities and improves readability of pages. This design contains a number of usability improvements requested by communities participants. See Homepage Design Proposal for details.
I'm looking forward to fixing some long-standing issues and improving everyone's experience on VMware Communities. Please feel free to comment or send me a private message if you have any questions.
Regards, Robert
in response to: 
Is the maintenance window not actually the whole weekend? I'm seeing (and making) new posts today (May 10), though the volume of posts is clearly reduced. Should users be worried about losing posts made during the weekend?