downtime today

[solarchat]

looks like the forum was down for a few periods today longer than normal. Obviously, it’s up now or you will not be reading this.
I have been working with Dreamhost to see if there’s anything on our end, but the problem seems to be on their end. It appears to be an ongoing DDoS attack-Directed Denial of Service.

Here’s a list of today’s outages from the uptime robot that I pay to monitor the site continuously.

2EE993A8-1B44-4B5B-98C5-A1607437E7EB.png (352.16 KiB) Viewed 8212 times

30652A89-6148-4AD8-9594-90EF457C0B96.png (516.24 KiB) Viewed 8212 times

[solarchat]

It’s the morning of the 18th now and things are slowly getting better.
The paid consultant and I instituted Cloudflare, cleantalk, and some other spambot countermeasures last night and they are taking affect finally.
We are currently in what’s called the "under attack" mode on Cloudflare so you may get a challenge when you sign in to make sure you are a human with good intentions, well, at least a human.
Now we just have to wait for these millions of spambots to go away for the speed to get back up.
I’m really sorry for the inconvenience and you can blame all this on malicious a’holes ruining the Internet for everyone else.
please be patient.

[rigel123]

Thanks for the update Stephen, don’t you wonder just what drives these idiots to pull this kind of stunt!

[solarchat]

I had to logout all users this morning a couple times to get rid of the bots and illegitimate accounts. Sorry if it made your life more stressful...
Looks like it is back to operating normally and slowly speeding back up.

[solarchat]

IT APPEARS THAT THE SPEED IS BACK AND EVERYTHING IS BACK TO NORMAL!!

I absolutely abhor spammers.

[ffellah]

Thank you Stephen for your work to keep everything going. It seems back to normal now.

Franco

[Montana]

Well done Stephen and thank you for all your hard work you won the battle and saved us all

Alexandra

[rigel123]

Thanks Stephen!

[Ibbo]

Thank you for sorting this out.

[DeepSolar64]

Thanks Stephen.It works now! I wonder who would do this? It was down all day for me, or at least every time I checked it.

[Carbon60]

Many thanks for your hard work, Stephen. It is really very much appreciated.

Stu.

[MAURITS]

Thanks Stephen.

[Bill_C]

Thank I Stephen!!

[marktownley]

Good work Boss!

[Martin_S]

Thanks for your hard work work Stephen

[rsfoto]

Hi Stephen,

Thank You for solving this problem.

[eroel]

Stephen:
Thank you very much for the hard work with the Forum.
Much appreciated.
Best regards.
eric.

[RichardJ]

Hi Stephen,

I would like to add my thanks as well.

Richard.