Well that's good news, Helen, as I think something went South on that database upgrade they started a while back:
register.jabber.org
June 25, 2013: We have temporarily disabled account registration at the jabber.org IM service while we migrate the account database to a new machine. We will enable the web registration form again as soon as possible! In the meantime, you can create an account at any other public XMPP service.
I've had lengthy upgrades, but 4 years?