Ladies,
Sorry for the late reply.
We have been trying to figure out why the forum is acting up lately. I have noticed 3 days in a row the servers have been literally hammered by traffic and that is unusual to say the least. Our servers are in most cases underutilized so that there is a lot more processing power if we need it.
I am not sure what the real reason was but we have been getting traffic 10x the normal and I have concluded after looking at the logs that it has been a deliberate attack (DDOS) to bring the site down.
The site is behind a load balancer which distributes the traffic evenly according to the load of each server behind it. This is to ensure that everyone has a nice and smooth experience. We also have a feature built in, by which if one server goes down for whatever reason the maintenance page shows up.
Now if that happens, unfortunately, your browser will cache the maintenance page and instead of showing you the actual content if you try to refresh the page, you get the maintenance one.
The easiest way to work around that (and this our of our control - it is a browser specific issue) is to press the Ctrl and F5 keys at the same time. This instructs your browser to get a fresh copy of the site which will give you the content you need.
The 404 pages are most likely the same story. I haven't seen any of them lately but it could very well be the time that the site was hammered and you happened to click one of the links or visit the content, or a cache issue.
There is a maintenance plan in play at the moment (for the next month or so). Servers will be upgraded and we will also change the forum software to something more modern, with a lot more features for you to enjoy.
Security has always been our main focus here. We want to make sure that we have the best forum software that offers the highest security and the best features.
I will follow up with you shortly as these are not plans yet materialized. Once I have the timeline ready I will make the necessary announcements.
Sorry for the late reply.
We have been trying to figure out why the forum is acting up lately. I have noticed 3 days in a row the servers have been literally hammered by traffic and that is unusual to say the least. Our servers are in most cases underutilized so that there is a lot more processing power if we need it.
I am not sure what the real reason was but we have been getting traffic 10x the normal and I have concluded after looking at the logs that it has been a deliberate attack (DDOS) to bring the site down.
The site is behind a load balancer which distributes the traffic evenly according to the load of each server behind it. This is to ensure that everyone has a nice and smooth experience. We also have a feature built in, by which if one server goes down for whatever reason the maintenance page shows up.
Now if that happens, unfortunately, your browser will cache the maintenance page and instead of showing you the actual content if you try to refresh the page, you get the maintenance one.
The easiest way to work around that (and this our of our control - it is a browser specific issue) is to press the Ctrl and F5 keys at the same time. This instructs your browser to get a fresh copy of the site which will give you the content you need.
The 404 pages are most likely the same story. I haven't seen any of them lately but it could very well be the time that the site was hammered and you happened to click one of the links or visit the content, or a cache issue.
There is a maintenance plan in play at the moment (for the next month or so). Servers will be upgraded and we will also change the forum software to something more modern, with a lot more features for you to enjoy.
Security has always been our main focus here. We want to make sure that we have the best forum software that offers the highest security and the best features.
I will follow up with you shortly as these are not plans yet materialized. Once I have the timeline ready I will make the necessary announcements.
