Discussion Forum

Not sure what's caused this but the website has gone down twice today.

I'm keeping an eye on things and hopefully it won't occur again, but apologies if it does.

I believe it may be related to the script which handles The Spoof's twitter feeds.

I'm looking into it, in the meantime I'm afraid the twitter feed will not be active.

The problem is persisting I'm afraid. I'm trying to eke out the cause and rectify the issue.

StumbleUpon link broken, maybe some connection to outage?

Looks like Add To Any is offline for maintenance. That's what the page said when I tried to use it.

I think the site is being spidered by lots of hosts simultaneously. I can't say it's a malicious attack, but it's persisting.

Have fixed the twitter feed.

It's possible the site may go offline in the night, there's not much I can do about it I'm afraid, but I'll try to keep on top of it.

As a consequence, you'll probably notice the site running relatively slowly, apologies for any inconvenience.

Apologies again that there was another outage overnight.

It appears as though this is a concerted attack. I've attempted to put some restrictions in place to mitigate the efforts of the attackers. Provided it's a dumb bit of software that's causing the problems then we should be okay. I'll keep an eye on things.

I hope the restrictions I've put in place won't affect normal users of the site, but if you hear of anyone who's having difficulties please let me know.

And the issue continues I'm afraid.

I'm trying my best to keep on top of it. There are things I can do, and am doing, to mitigate the attack.

Give them hell Mark!

And best of luck

Good luck with dealing with DOS. Seems ok now. Some hacker noticed a vulnerability I suppose.

No vulnerability that I'm aware of, at least not that's specific to The Spoof.

Most websites are vulnerable to DoS, unless you've got a bulky enough infrastructure to take on a gazillion requests. This I cannot afford

Keep up the good work

Okay, I don't want to jinx things because I've thought this a few times this morning...but I think we're doing good.

I've completed the updates I wanted to get done this morning and everything seems to be running much, much better.

Please let me know if you encounter anything that's broken and I'll endeavour to fix it asap. I'll be monitoring this thread.

Thanks to everyone who emailed for your messages of support, it's much appreciated.

Vast improvement over the past few days.

Just noticed that the points system still not 100%, not registering the automatic 50 points when a spoof goes to Published.

And we seem to be stuck at '20' readers now online.

Mark - well done for getting this back - it must have been stressful - I bet it was the North Koreans who did this - or a herd of Justin Bieber fans....

All fast and responsive here. Obviously that drop of WD40 into the servers worked.

Fixed the reader counter. Given the site's three day hiatus, it's likely to be quite lower than usual because search engines don't like dead sites. Let's hope it picks up soon.

The points appear to be logged in the system, it could be there's an issue with the reporting but I'm not seeing any error messages for that.

Thanks Duncan, it was stressful. I'd like to see Justin Bieber being punched by Kim-Jong Un while Orlando Bloom tweets pictures.

Even if I do say so myself, I'm very pleased. The site's running really well now and very fast. There's a fair amount of bits and bobs still to fix following the upgrades, but overall it's pretty awesome.

Thanks to everyone for your patience.

If this is a malicious attack and you manage to find out who is behind it, would you kindly tell us who it is? I can think of a few who would like to gag us all for keeps.

I think if it were a motivated attack we'd know the perpetrators already.

We're still getting the odd spike but, thankfully, the measures I've put in place seem to be doing the trick.

Sorry for that blip - my bad

Sorry for that blip - my bad

Twitter link is down, probably Facebook too, will look to resolve as soon as I can.

Something strange going on in the Writers Desk Points Breakdown Table Rank - instead of 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc it's saying ERR.

Short for error?

Yeah, it's an error I saw was occurring and I put that in as a temporary solution to enable people to still access their writers desk. I can try to fix in time.

The sign in wasn't working yesterday.
It would just loop around.

But it's working now?

Since this discussion is in the general forum, if any writers are reading this and you can't log in, please send me an email.