Forum Outages

[Casey]

Apologies for the forum being offline for a few days. I was on holiday and only noticed when I got back on Friday night.

Our hosting company (UK2) shut the forum down due to automated security checks reporting suspicious outgoing traffic from our forum to known dodgy servers. I have been unable to verify this, the forum looks clean and operating as it should. I had to carry out a number of security checks requested by UK2 (all showed no issues), including changing a number of passwords. That done, they have put the forum back online.

A bit of a mystery - this happened last month too 

As an extra precaution I have blocked all access to our server by country, so all IP addresses allocated to the Russian Federation, China, Iran, Iraq, etc, should no longer be able to get through the UK2 firewall.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to manage forums now, as there are so many bots crawling continuously and downloading forum files to feed voracious AI learning models!! These bots are overloading our server and it's proving hard to prevent their access.....