The forum was down from approximately 3am to 11am Melbourne time today due to database issues at the current hosting provider. A migration away from this provider onto an alternate hosting solution is already in progress. The "Account Suspended" messages that get displayed during these outages are related to the website account at the hosting provider, not individual user accounts. Status updates during outages will *always* be posted on the Silver Stackers Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/SilverStackers (public page, no Facebook signup required). Finally, please note that the Gold Stackers office phone, website contact forms and email addresses are not alternative support channels for Silver Stackers - they are separate businesses, and there are staff at Gold Stackers who are not involved with Silver Stackers, who are getting a little grumpy at me this morning :/
Just a reminder - http://www.facebook.com/SilverStackers is the official support page for announcements during outages. No registration is required to access this page. Update from the host is that the site was brought down as a result of the registration page being hammered - looks like an SEO spammer pointed a bot at the site and it ran wild.
Update 11th October 2012 The registration page is essentially being subject to a denial of service attack due to a rogue spambot - I've had to disable registrations on the site for a few days. A migration has not been performed today as planned, but will occur over the next few days. As mentioned earlier - http://www.facebook.com/SilverStackers is the support page for announcements. thanks
GP,. They always seem to attack this site in the wee hours of the mornings. Do you want the night owls to report if we suspect it to be a spam attack? At this time , is there any one here on SS that can do anything about it? Regards Errol 43
haha this was the first time its happened to me when i've wanted to come on.. i had to email maggie to see wats up.
Glad to see the site back up. Moving to a more poweful server can help, but implementing a strong .htaccess file is likely a better solution. I'm banning IP ranges for entire countries (ie. China, Lithuania, Russia, etc.) that have low likelyhood of real, contributing members and high likelyhood of bot activity. YMMV.