On Friday we made a preview release of Steem 0.16.0 with the complete implementation of all protocol changes. The witnesses have been reviewing this code to verify that it should behave as intended.
The hardfork has been scheduled for December 6th (2 weeks from today) so that everyone has ample time to review and prepare. No official release has been published at this time, but should be published at least 7 days prior to the hardfork.
Issues Delaying Official Steem 0.16.0 Release
It has recently come to our attention that the shared memory implementation is suffering from some crippling performance issues on Linux. We have identified the cause as a poor default configuration of the Linux operating system's virtual memory system. Our developers have identified a simple change to our code that seems to mitigate the issue under the default configuration and we are currently testing various settings that should optimize OS virtual memory subsystem.
Once we finalize recommended OS configuration settings we will publish the final release.