"Down for maintenance"

There is something strange going on over at CAMRA’s National Heritage Pub website, as anyone who has tried logging on recently will know. Rather than being able to access information about the UK’s remaining “unspoilt” stock of pubs; the ones which are rightly regarded as “heritage pubs” and hence “National Treasures”,  visitors are instead confronted with the following message:

We’ll be back soon!  Sorry for the inconvenience, but we’re performing some critical maintenance at the moment. - The CAMRA IT Team.

I wouldn’t say I’m a regular visitor to the site, but I do find it useful especially when planning a trip to a new area. Several years ago, I made up my mind to visit as many of the country’s remaining “heritage pubs” as possible, but with the website down for “maintenance” it’s proving difficult to track them down.

What I hadn’t realised was just how long the site has actually been down, as it was only a disgruntled email from a correspondent, on one of the CAMRA discourse forums, which alerted me to the fact the website has been undergoing "critical maintenance" for six months now.

So does anybody out there know the reason why this important resource has been unavailable for so long? And can anyone, especially someone from CAMRA, say when it might be up and running again?

Data protection and/or security issues have been cited as possible reasons, but whatever the problem it seems absolutely incredible that a site could be out of action for such a lengthy period of time, in this day and age.

pubheritage.camra.org.uk

Footnote: the photos are of two historic, absolute gems, which I am privileged to have visited. Both are called the Red Lion, but that is the most common pub name in England.