Premium Service Update

Aug 31 2014, 03:15 PM

Premium Service Update

It has been over a month since we launched our Premium Service offering , and it's been a great success. We've heard a lot of feedback from forum owners about what they want to see in Premium in the near future and have been taking note.

Today, we bring a feature that adds more value to the Premium Service: the ability to put additional forums on a single premium subscription!

Premium Service: Additional Forums

Up until now, if you wanted to run more than one forum or have a test/development board with Premium as well, you would have had to pay for a second subscription. This is no longer necessary.

As of today, you can now add up to two (2) additional forums to any existing subscription at no charge!

Yes, you read that correctly.

The subscription you have for one forum serves as a "master subscription" for the additional boards. This benefit applies to both monthly AND yearly subscriptions! This means a single Premium subscription allows running (3) three forums total, including the master forum subscription.

To view more information, click here: Premium Service: Additional Forums

We hope you enjoy this benefit of being a paid subscriber to our services and thank you for your continued support!

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Update on Performance Issues

Aug 17 2014, 03:13 AM

This is an update to some of the already-posted about performance issues.

Since the beginning of the month, we noted a severe increase in spam in guest forums. Spammers hitting open 'guest' and advertisement forums on dead communities became a burden on the server. The effect of this has been spurts of 2-3 minutes of downtime per every other day.

We've taken various measures to alleviate this problem:

  • ~2,000 or more boards specifically created by spammers themselves to fill up with junk have been deleted.
  • ~25,000 old boards pre-2012 and some early 2013 that were "inactive" filling with spam daily were deleted.
  • CAPTCHA implemented for very old and newer-ish boards. Captcha removed due to being ineffective with the spambots...
  • Boards where no administrator or sub-admin has logged in during the last 60 days have guest posting disabled until someone logs in.
This helped lighten the load, but we determined that the server needed an additional hard drive for storage of forums, as the other one was stressed from regular activity as well as the spam. The below was purchased and installed:They took some time to ship out from CA and were installed mid-week. As with all new hardware we try to test it before putting it into service. The WDs are now servicing all newly created boards, and we moved the support board to it.

We still have more work to do to lighten the load on the first disk by dropping even more spam-infested boards, but we expect things to balance out now that the new disk is installed. But this will take more time and effort on our part to manage and mitigate the rest of the spam.

We do apologize for the performance issues and thank everyone for their understanding and sticking with us.

Thank you,

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Performance Issues

Aug 2 2014, 05:10 PM

This topic is to acknowledge some performance issues occurring in the last two days. Advertisement spammers are hitting/attacking the server pretty hard at this time and are causing high loads. We're working to resolve this by clearing out old spam infested boards and we'll be implementing further measures.

Unfortunately, you will experience lag/occasional bad gateways until this is under control.

We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

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