Looks like the Mepis Sites are down.
 

Installed 8.5 on to my laptop last night, was able to update, but not access the forums to find the fix for a video problem I had. Notice it's still down this morning.

The forums do indeed appear to be down. The community site is still up but I think that may be hosted separately. I guess you could either ask any questions here or on the antiX forums...

Just checked Akregator & Warren tweeted that the data center where the servers are hosted is having an unscheduled outage. No ETA as yet...

Yep - problem at the data centre, see:

http://www.mepiscommunity.org/node/887

It is likely that the site is hosted 'piggy-back' on a friendly corporate server, when that goes down, they will sort out their own sites first, then the rest so difficult to predict eta until fixed. No doubt won't be too long.

I later saw this http://twitter.com/mepisguy "the MEPIS servers are down due to a problem at the data center--I don't have an ETA for when it will be fixed"

FWIW,

1. Last night I couldn't add Impress to my OOo 2.3 install on MEPIS 8.0.10 at the office.
2. This am I could update Google chrome at home.
3. This am mepis.org/ & mepislovers.org/ give:
   "An error occurred while loading ...
   Unknown host ..."

All seems to be back now! :)