Heresy offline - temporarily

[Darkson]

Hi all!

Some of you may have noticed the attractive, colourful text adorning the
Heresy and therefore the Forum of Doom, informing you that the Account
has Been Suspended! Whilst this may be an Ill Omen, (since I find myself
several thousand pounds short of my tax bill at the end of January, this
could be a sign of things to come), it is not yet a permanent situation!
Unfortunately, the technical support staff at ukhost4u.com, the web
hosting providers, have all gone home and left me high and dry with a
suspended account; the only information they gave me was that the forum
had made 800 process requests and overloaded the server, so they
suspended the account until I can expplain myself. Of course, it is
rather hard to explain anything when one can't actually access any
files, servers, databases etc, though this seems to be irrelevant for
some reason. I shall of course, be telephoning them first thing tomorrow
morning to express my concerns of them robbing me of half a day's
trading, and if I cna find an alternative, reliable webhost, i shall
certainly consider moving the main site.

We have had a large numbe rof spam accoutns trying to register on teh
FOD in the last week or two, it's p[ossible one of them got through
somehow and started posting or something. I shall let you know.
Meanwhile, my apologies to one and all that have tried to access the
site only to fail. Please pass on this information to any other forums
you frequent or online friends you have . Normal service should be
resumed tomorrow morning. I'm off to shout at invisible things in
frustration.

all the best

Andy

[Darkson]

Little update on last night's website suspension!

OK, so apparently at 5.20pm someone or something initiated a massive chain of processes from the Forum of Doom main page - over 800 and multiplying when the webhosts suspended the account. We're on a shared server so it took down 200 other sites when the server crashed, causing mucvh complaints to dela with for the tech support guys. I know you'll all share my desire to wip[e back a tear. I spent the whole night hanging around on my computer trying to get replies to my emails to customer support, but cut a long story short it was sorted out when they finaly answered the phone this morning. The upshot of it all is that the FOD is temporarily unavailable whilst it is moved to a separate server from the main Heresy site. I'll be asking the resident tech-lord, fear_the _squirrels, to look through the logs and see if he can determine what happened at 5.20pm csi-style. The forum was up to date on security and stuff, so whatever it was, was likely something beyond a mere spambot. Apparently reaper Miniatures had a denial of service attack on the 21st so it may potentially be something connected to that, using the php software that the forum runs on to embugger the server.
Anyway, the main site is back and open for business, and the forum will be re-opening shortly. New registrations will be temporarily disabled until we sort some facts from theories...
www.heresyminiatures.com

Now that that minor catastrophe is dealt with, I need to get some pics taken of some new mdoels, cos I really, really, need some money by next week - not only the mortgage to pay on the 1st but also the remainder of the deposit for Salute comes out of the account!
Stand by for more trenchcoat types, a halfling sorceress, a chunky new ogre and a Blight hero for starters!

Speak to you soon,

Andy F

Hurrah!

FODders, you can now access the FOD again at it's new address:

http://forum-of-doom.com/index.php

All appears fine except the avatar directory got lost somehwere in my
attempts to rename directories on the new server configuration admin
page thingy. They should be back soon, though, once Fear-the-
squirrels sort sout my incompetent coding!

With the FOD on the new server, hopefully this means the end of my
site killing the one it's on already! At last, the Heresy site should
stay up if the FOD goes down, and vice versa!

Now everyone get over there and get posting!

Cheers
Andy (using a lot of exclamation marks this evening!)

(!!)