Quiet here ....

[slparry]

.... can everyone still login?

[Humbug]

Can log in but none of the quick links work, I get a forbidden message for them all.
Makes a quick trawl difficult as the red indicators have also gone now so I can't quickly see new or unread posts.

[Paul]

There is a problem for people visiting the site as guests to then log on. They are getting a permission denied error from the Apache Web server. There is also a similar problem for people who are already logged on to access some functionality such as search and PMs. This is a symptom of the same problem.

In order to address the Denial of Service (DoS) attacks the site was suffering for which led to the famous "SQLi gone away" error, I made changes with the help of the hosting company to try and address that. One of the unexpected side effects of those changes is this new problem. I am trying to unpick the changes we made, but I do need the hosting company to do some of that and it appears the engineer I was talking too is off for the weekend...

In the mean time, I have installed a new 3rd party service to filter out DoS attacks before they reach the site. Now that is in place, we should be able to safely roll back the other changes we made and restore the normal functionality of the board.

Hopefully by Monday evening all should be working again.

Apologies for the disruption to the site, but rest assured I'm working to get it sorted ASAP. I have no idea what benefit the hackers we are fighting against think they will gain by bringing down this site but unfortunately this is the price we have to pay to stop their fun and games for the time being...

Paul