July 29th outage

[moon puppy]

Sorry about that guys. Site was down since about 9am edt.

Same mode of attack, crawlers, bots scarfin' up the website. I had a suggestion from the host on how to block them another way than what I had in place. Thought what I had stopped them but obviously not.

On a positive note, just last night I made the purchase of the new hosting service, we'll have our one Virtual Private Server, VPS that is scalable, so if we need more ram, more hard drive space we just add it for $$$.

The new Wordpress site is up so now all we have to do is make it look pretty. :dance

I don't want to share the link yet as it's a WIP and will likely change before it's over so just bear with us as we get this developed. :skipper :drunk

 

[White_Wolf]

Not a problem MP, don't worry about the downtime.

You're doing a great job, I am sure everyone appreciates the effort involved.

:drinks


Laurence

 

[iambrb]

Well glad to hear it wasn't too bad! Thanks for everything thing that you & the site do for us!

 

[moon puppy]

Bruce when you called I was in the middle of our customer service dept, just got a new call center fired up and had 20 questions firing off at me. It was a MAD HOUSE, A MAD HOUSE!!
:frantic

 

[Hawkwrench]

Thanks MP for all you do for us guys, we appreciate your hard work!!!

Tim

 

[SA Dave]

Thanks MP for all you do for us guys, we appreciate your hard work!!!

Tim

Yeah what he said

 

[moon puppy]

thanks guys, just checked the logs and it looks like we're still getting scanned. I put in place some more blockage so maybe it'll settle down some. So if you see error message again, you'll know what's up.

 

[Swordsman]

Yeah what they all said ... On the new site it will still be a forum right ??? the last place switched to a FB style ... I didn't like it ...

Be careful ... it could be trouble :salute

 

[moon puppy]

Yep, new site will have a full on forum just like here, PHPBB wrapped inside WordPress. A forum platform you all are very familiar with.
Wordpress will drive our front end with news, reviews and managing our profiles while PHPBB will drive the forum.

I don't know if anyone was using this stuff but I just turned off all RSS feed on the site. If you were using it, sorry.

 

[SA Dave]

I just want to say It was not me that crashed the site - THIS TIME :geek

 

[Heavens Eagle]

Had a huch it was something like that and since you were at work is why I sent you a text. Work comes first.

Like the others all said, much appreciate your work on the site!

At current time I am creating a big graphical "This is screwed up how and why" to ACD on their Canvas version 16. Going to submit it as a .pdf file. So far it is 9 pages with text and graphics. Doing something I doubt that amy one else has done. Maybe it will get their attention so they will repair the program. If not I will do like I am sure a lot of other folks have done which is go back to an earlier version and fire the company. If they are going to put out crap, I won't be buying it.
Wish me luck.

As to the new MA site Bob, if you need some testing assistance, let me know.

 

[moon puppy]

Thanks Paul, you were on my short list for alpha and beta testers. Paul if you're creating this PDF for our site I can't post PDFs on the front page. Just FYI. New site will have all sorts of options.

 

[iambrb]

Bruce when you called I was in the middle of our customer service dept, just got a new call center fired up and had 20 questions firing off at me. It was a MAD HOUSE, A MAD HOUSE!!
:frantic

Dude no sweat! Like I have told you before, all I need is "Busy/gotta go". I am really loving the new job/company, but we are startup so it is like that for me from the moment I get there until I go. I have even told certain people that the toilet is off limits for pretty much EVERYTHING, so like I said, no sweat.

 

[iambrb]

Bruce when you called I was in the middle of our customer service dept, just got a new call center fired up and had 20 questions firing off at me. It was a MAD HOUSE, A MAD HOUSE!!
:frantic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMnM_cQu6Fo

 

[Duke Maddog]

Bob, I also want to thank you for all you do. It is appreciated more than you know. Saul, I also want to thank you for your response to me on the Facebook site when I posted my difficulty. You guys rock.

 

[moon puppy]

Yeah baby! This is what i'm talkin' about.

That crawler bot, "SimplePie" was one of the offenders. The error message means they are not allowed to do what they are doing so there... :pp

What the problem is the hit so hard that they take up the limit of our resources on our shared hosting service so the host puts us in time out. Generally the clowns at HostGator says we have bad script running on our website, they don't look at the external load coming into the site.

With the new VPS, we control the server. :coolio If I find things hitting the site hard I won't shut the site down, I'll throw some block kungfu on them. :fencing

 

[Duke Maddog]

Right on! Thanks for blocking that fool. Great job!