hi.

i think it's about time you reset the server, or something.

the last 2 days this forum has been extremely slow!.

a little annoyed right now- especially since i'm not if my posts are even going through once, or maybe more..

Agreed, things on here have been really slow this morning. My laptop is new, and other sites are pulling up fine.

I was just about to post the same complaint. The hamsters aren't running fast enough on the wheel lately. Feel like I'm on an old dial-up system.

Aha! Those hamsters suddenly seem to finally have woken up. Working better.

Edit: Never mind. They fell asleep again. Having a lot of problems of trying to post, hitting Save and getting told the site is not working. Frustrating.

[DocJohn]

Yes, we acknowledge it's a little annoying right now, but it's because our hosting location (but not us specifically) has been the target of a DDOS attack, which marginally affects us and the forum's speed. It should be fixed now.

DocJohn

Originally Posted by DocJohn

Yes, we acknowledge it's a little annoying right now, but it's because our hosting location (but not us specifically) has been the target of a DDOS attack, which marginally affects us and the forum's speed. It should be fixed now.

DocJohn

oh!

and what's 1 of those?

[Oxidopamine]

Originally Posted by shattered sanity

oh!

and what's 1 of those?

A DDOS is a large-scale, frequent series of DOS attacks to prevent people from accessing a network. A DOS is a denial of service attack, it's more of a phenomenon with many strategies. DOS attacks target DNS servers, which converts a URL (i.e. this forum page) to an IP address (since humans are better at memorizing words than numbers) for computers and servers to communicate. When the DNS server is attacked in some way and unable to respond, people can no longer connect to the network. A DDOS is worse in that it targets root servers names, which could prevent access to numerous, unrelated websites. Servers have very powerful security measures in place to prevent these attacks as best as possible and ISPs (Internet service providers) have additional measures.

There's much more complexity to this, including root access (computer speak for gaining administrative power over the network).

[TheRealFDeal]

I have not noticed an improvement. The site has been really slow for a couple of days now, and continues....

[DocJohn]

If you access it in the middle of the night (as your time stamp for this message suggests), you will probably always find it slower than during the day (U.S. East coast time). That's when we do our backups, and there's no getting around the need to do them, and the fact that it will always impact the forum's performance a bit.

We simply schedule them for when there is the least amount of traffic, and unfortunately that's early morning our time.

DocJohn

[Lexi232]

Hmm... I really haven't noticed much speed diffrence on my side......... tho there are occationally times i click thinks and it just spins it little wheel around and around. and when i click on it again, it will normally go. but i just thought that was my internet itself, lol because it's doing stuff like that off and on for many sites.

EDIT: Too bad you can add your own DDos into the system that sends out to anyone who tries to DDos the server. If a lot more people did that, I think it would stop a lot of the malicious hackers from doing things such as that.

[pachyderm]

Originally Posted by Lexi232

Too bad you can add your own DDos into the system that sends out to anyone who tries to DDos the server.

Trouble is, the people who mount these attacks do so by commandeering computers all over the Internet to send out the attacks, and you can't easily tell where the attack originated. So sending return DDOS's would just further screw up the Internet!

This is a reason to have your system protected against viruses, trojans, etc. Those are the things that allow malefactors to get control of your computer and direct it to attack -- even without your knowing it is happening.