just curious...

Yes, started today.

Me three. DDOS attacks?

Yeah, what's up with that? My first thought was that the site was down, I had to "Verify you are human" like three times before it let me acces the site.

And I've been having trouble posting in the forums lately too. Sometimes when you hit "Submit" it just logs you out and forces you to log back in (and then you have to re-type your post.)

Same thing has been happening to me today, I recently updated Chrome so I thought that might have been the reason. Is anybody here using a different web browser and having the same issues?

The site is Cloudflared, the main page loads an image and two cookies from Discord, and there's Google Analytics JS on the main page and all wiki pages.

My personal preference would be to forgo any of these inclusions.

It's normal. We've had to implement this Cloudflare anti-bot measure because of recent DDoS bullshit.

This isn't permanent, is it? Because I can see this driving users away in droves.

Not only this, it's also royally screwed up the MA app on my iPhone, I can't do anything with it right now. I'm assuming there will be an update to the app to mitigate this problem, but it's royally annoying at the moment.

Also, any image that you copy the address from, from this site, and link it as an image to somewhere else (say, another heavy metal message board), comes up as a broken link.

So something is obviously happening in the background that is connected to that issue, which is fucking up some other things around it.

Hopefully the mods / admin can figure out what it is

Like Az said, the site is under DDoS attack, so we enabled extra protection on Cloudflare. It's unfortunate that it breaks some third-party stuff, but that's not my responsibility and my priority is keeping the main site running smoothly. If someone has a legitimate bot use, feel free to email me to set up an arrangement.

If anyone cares to find the fragile little boys doing this and kick their teeth in, by all means, it will then be my pleasure to disable the anti-bot system. Until then, it stays up as I laugh at them wasting time and money to absolutely no effect.

Understood, I had no idea that this was more than just the culmination of a bunch of random bots gumming up the works. I'd gladly smash the testicles of whoever is waging this attack into oblivion were I able to track them down. I'll manage just using Safari on my iPhone until this crap gets sorted out, no worries.

Do we know if they have any?

The verification seems to expire after mere seconds. Spending more than say, a minute on a page is enough to reset the system and require another verification. Surely this site's cookies don't expire that quickly? Though no one else has mentioned this, making me wonder if it's just something with my individual computer.

It was supposed to be good for 30 minutes (and that seems to be the case for me), so it sounds like something on your side is interfering with Cloudflare's system somehow.

Anyway, I tweaked the settings a bit to be less annoying for regular site use now.

I was running on that assumption based on past disgruntled trolls who've been ejected from this site being the prime suspects, and my recollection of who they were pointed in that direction. Naturally this isn't necessarily the case, particularly if we're dealing with a capricious person who is doing this just for the fun of it.