As you will have noticed, the Forums are either very hard to reach or very hard to use.
The Forums server in itself is entirely functional, but the 'front door' is being hammered by many thousands of IP addresses opening and closing the Forums website at a large rate (for the interested: nginx throws 499 errors), causing slowness and resource starvation.
I have made the decision to try to thwart these bots by installing the bot-check software called Anubis (go-anubis; you will recognize it from the interstitial screen before a forum page is loaded - your browser gets a little javascript riddle to solve, and you're in) which will redirect most of the attacks to a quick termination.
This has brought the forums back online, but it will be (much) slower than usual, and sometimes connections will stall or time out until this attack dies down.
Also, people not allowing javascript cannot visit. I'm sorry: it's the lesser of two evils.
For the time being, I advise people making posts or opening threads to copy whatever they're writing before actually posting, so they don't lose their work when the process fails.
The Forums server in itself is entirely functional, but the 'front door' is being hammered by many thousands of IP addresses opening and closing the Forums website at a large rate (for the interested: nginx throws 499 errors), causing slowness and resource starvation.
I have made the decision to try to thwart these bots by installing the bot-check software called Anubis (go-anubis; you will recognize it from the interstitial screen before a forum page is loaded - your browser gets a little javascript riddle to solve, and you're in) which will redirect most of the attacks to a quick termination.
This has brought the forums back online, but it will be (much) slower than usual, and sometimes connections will stall or time out until this attack dies down.
Also, people not allowing javascript cannot visit. I'm sorry: it's the lesser of two evils.
For the time being, I advise people making posts or opening threads to copy whatever they're writing before actually posting, so they don't lose their work when the process fails.