Greg

no, but we've had a massive bump in US traffic, and I'm trying to figure out why. I presume it's mostly AI training bots, but after banning known AI crawlers yesterday, the traffic remains. I've also been dragging my feet on the forum upgrade (it's a big one), and once that is done, internal search will return, and the server should be able to manage the increased traffic more easily.

I rebooted the server, and going to look closer at banning AI bots, which seem to be hammering the server

Chinese bots... I've banned Chinese IPs (well, an noninteractive block), as they're responsible for over 350,000 requests in the past 24 hours. That should help solve some of the problem. I also need to upgrade the forum... I'm going to post a notice about that... Nothing you can do really, hopefully the web proxy can filter most of the bots out.

If this continues to happen, please post below. thanks!

The site has been under attack lately, with bots hitting it hard the last few days (see the peaks below). There are things I can do to reject this attacks, but they often change their tactics. If there is any site maintenance, I would post here.

There is no conspiracy here, robosmith deleted his opening post, and that took the whole thread with it. Deleted posts go into a 30 day hold, then are deleted (or recovered, if the deletion was by accident).

You will need to post few more times (5 is the limit I believe), before that functionality is available to you.

I always thought that would be fun to watch.

I apologize for the issue, IPB shut down support for SendGrid, which is the service we were using to send transactional email. This issue has been fixed, and emails should now resume sending.

I'll look into this issue.

Share the link to the forum, I don't care (if anyone was concerned that I would care). FYI - I'm curious too.

And what are you implying? That speakers should be suddenly worried to voice an opinion?

Guns cause homicides? That’s your argument?

Ha, gun ownership = violence. A ridiculous argument, for sure. Please enlighten us all with more evidence of your ideas.

He's banned, and will not return. I'm officially done with this type of nonsense. More will be banned shortly... You've all been warned. If threats of violence continue, I'll send you'll packing. I'm officially on the war path.. cross me and you'll be banned.

complete nonsense. Utter bullshit.

Go away Michael, I’m in no mood for your bullshit.

Cause they consistency say asinine / borderline illegal things. Why do you bitch and complain about things you know to be true?

He can't, I banned him, and boy did I had fun doing it.

Boges been banned for obvious reasons. Anyone else want to piss me off today>?

An update went sideways and I didn't realize it to the next day. My fault! I've also recently upgraded the license, so I'm going to be doing a full forum software upgrade in a day or two - which means there maybe some downtime -- hopefully not, but this is a major upgrade, and requires a complete manual upgrade of the forum software.

Very stupid things have been said in this thread. I've removed most of those statements, but if anyone steps over the line again, they'll be repercussions.

It's not a bad proposal, and I'll be open to at least trying something like this on a trial basis - or perhaps just designating certain featured threads as moderated. Perhaps limiting a mods ability to moderate to a specific forum (US Politics, Canadian Politics, etc) or certain threads, which would allow them to participate elsewhere, while maintaining their little piece of the forum. However, I am a strong proponent of freedom of speech, and I hate censorship - so even in a scenario above, severe restrictions should be imposed on the mods to ensure they don't remove unpopular opinions and or facts.

Soon. The forum upgrade is right around the corner, but it's such a big upgrade, its going to take me a while to get everything sorted out...