For some reason, I couldn't log in for several days last week.

I really missed the Cafe.

I'm so happy to see it up and running again.

Thanks to all.

- Mary

I'm guessing it might have been bot attacks. Has been happening to many forums (including mine and genii forums) recently.

There was a recent automatic server update distro that caused problems with many servers for sites using PHP. Not just this one.

Thanks for sharing the technical details, Gene. It sounds like it was the same issue that took down the Genii Forum as well, then. The Vanishing Inc. Magic outage was most likely connected to the Cloudflare issue.

@Chris, the websites that we run at the university I work at are experiencing an alarming increase in bot attacks. I'm convinced some of this activity is carried out by state-backed Russian hackers.

Oh, and a big thank you to Gene and the team for fixing the issue so promptly. Regular website maintenance is underappreciated until the website breaks!

It's the chinese for sure (at least for my forums, which had thousands of bots attacking at once, continuously). I can see it in my logs. They're violently scraping php based sites (forums and otherwise) for AI building purposes.

I "IP blocked" China (every bit of it!) and.... all seems well now.

.

Getting lots of "server timeouts" the last few days and right now, anyone else? I also could not log in and got logged out several times, and several others told me this as well via PM while contacting me about my books for sale. It is on and off mostly, and had a longer time where it worked earlier. Maybe there are updates being made now in the early morning though when less are on? Post hangs for a long time then goes to the error page, or works within 5 to 10 seconds, then back to almost instantly.