All,
First of all, apologies for the 3-4 brief outages and flurry of "out of space" error messages many were seeing over the past six weeks. We had become victims of our own success; the entry-level GoDaddy hosting plan was no longer cutting it for our more than 10,000 sudomodders! And apologies for everyone seeing "You've been banned from this forum - IP ban" a couple of times this morning. I wanted to let you know why that happened and what we're doing to try to keep things running smoothly!
A few of us real nerds got together and built a platform on Amazon Web Services, leveraging a Docker solution to provide more resources to the site, forums, and wiki. (The Market is external to the main site, more on that later.) After we implemented this platform last night and cut over the forums, we continued receiving the usual flow of spam posts that most Internet forums receive. Our awesome mods leveraged the fine BanHammer to rid us of spam, but this led to the unintended consequence of banning all visitors to the site. The reason was that the banhammer extension is monitoring the referral IP (which is our proxy), not the client's real IP that the proxy passes under different headers. I'm working on correcting that ASAP so that we can get rid of spam without the collateral damage of banning all users.
You may have already noticed how much more responsive the site feels today, and when we continue to grow, we'll easily be able to scale as needed now, and open up opportunities to look at better solutions for things like the Wiki and the Market. The downside is that this will increase our hosting spend somewhat. Ad revenue is minimal but at least takes a small dent out of the hosting bill without much interference in site usability. That's always a hard balance to strike.
Just like NPR and PBS, we will occasionally reach out to remind you that there's a PayPal donate link at the bottom of the page, and no amount is too small. Unlike those campaigns, however, ***there will be no tote bags.*** So sorry.
In full disclosure, Wermy did buy me some beer as thanks, but I did my work on this project out of my love of this community. None of our mods or admins are actively compensated for their work, and all donations go directly to hosting costs, no exceptions.I'm happy to answer any questions you have in earnest to the best of my ability. If this were a YouTube video, I'd tell you to "Like and Subscribe and don't forget to enable Notifications!" but it's not, so instead, if you have a couple extra bucks in your PayPal balance, please toss wermy a few dollars to keep us going? Thanks!