The Forum Downtime

[philipy]

We thought it might be of interest if we gave you all a quick rundown of what has been happening this past few weeks and why we were offline for a while. We did manage to get some explanation out to a few members last week but since we couldn't access the files we had no way of knowing an email address for most members.

The basic problem was an overload of out of control Bots scraping our site, who didn't/don't follow normal procedures/restrictions. The result was that as soon as they finished indexing our site, if something had changed like a member posting something, the Bots went back to the beginning and started again. This just escalated exponentially and eventually went over our Hosts poster limit for the site and we ended up with the General Error that we've all seen, saying there were 1200 posters and over the limit of 1000.

At this point we asked a fairly new member, TeBee, to help because he is a retired PHP programmer. He very helpfully jumped straight in and was able to mitigate the problem to some extent. However, the problem is not just limited to us, it is affecting PHPBB's all over the 'net and requires some significant reprogramming of the BB software to eliminate it.
As a result, Tom's fixes only lasted a short while before we were overwhelmed again and that resulted in us having the hosting account suspended. Rik managed to convince the Host to unsuspend us so that Tom could again try to fix the problem, but once more this only lasted a day or so before we were suspended again and received a threat to simply delete our account.

We were getting no help at all from the Hosting company, 123-Reg, to deal with our problem. For a number of years we were with TSO Hosts with no problems, but then they got taken over by 123-Reg and at some point, as we have now discovered, they in turn were taken over by GoDaddy. They offered no technical help, saying that they were not developers, and they really only wanted to try selling increasingly expensive "upgrades" which got nowhere towards a technical solution.

So we decided that the best answer might be to transfer to a new Host who is willing and able to help. All 3 of us spent a lot of time searching and trying find the 'right' company. That was not as easy as it might sound though, for example, one that we quite liked the look of, with a Head Office in London, turned out to be just the front for an operation in India!
Eventually we settled on a Hosting company called Zume (NOT Zoom!) who are based in Congleton, Cheshire, and have excellent reviews, good support and a number of built-in facilities that 123-Reg didn't have, like Cloudflare for example. Our files and databases etc were all migrated over by Zume with no problems in less than an hour ( once we had all variously pressed the right buttons, which did take a while to sort out, I must admit!). After getting the DNS transfer sorted on the nameservers, we were back online at about 08-15 UK time this morning.

Hopefully you will not notice any differences, day to day, although I think it seems to be loading a wee bit faster.

Edited to add that I know that Rik has tried to downplay his involvement, but in all honesty it has been a 3-way effort and we've all contributed as much as we can, wherever we could. We certainly couldn't have achieved what we have without Tom's efforts. so our thanks to you Tom.