Technical issues appear to be resolved (update 2, Friday afternoon) [View all]

Last edited Fri Mar 7, 2025, 03:19 PM - Edit history (2)

UPDATE FRIDAY 2:20 PM ET:

We switched back to normal mode this morning and everything has been working fine so far. We can't be sure, but we now suspect that the issue may have been something to do with a major botnet attack which occurred yesterday -- it wasn't directed at us specifically, but many sites appear to have been caught in the crossfire. Details are in reply 28 below. As of now things appear to be back to normal. Our apologies for the inconvenience.


UPDATE 9:40 PM ET: We’re still having issues when attempting to open the site to all visitors, but it’s looking increasingly like “server weirdness” (that’s the technical explanation) rather than anything nefarious.

The site is currently running smoothly in “members only” mode, so we’re going to leave things as they are overnight and see how things are in the morning. If the issues persist, we’ll need to do further troubleshooting.


ORIGINAL MESSAGE:

We appear to be experiencing unusually high traffic, which is causing the site to slow down and crash

In order to compensate while we investigate the situation, we've temporarily switched to registered members only, which significantly reduces the load on our database. Hopefully this is not a major problem, and we'll have an update for you soon.