Forum got knocked down, but now it's up again

[Neil Fitzgerald]

Many of you will have noticed that BirdingNZ has been down for the best part of the last couple of days. The initial problem was likely a massive increase in traffic coming from overseas, which caused server limits to be exceeded. Very dodgy and now blocked. In order to pick apart the cause and eliminate risks I had to update all the board scripts. I had been putting this off because it required quite a bit of work, and some features we previously had would need to be abandoned, but eventually and inevitably the wheels fell off and my hand was forced.
So, now we are back. In order to get back up as quickly as possible, we are looking a bit different. There will be bugs and I will need to tweak a few things. Let me know if you hate it.
Some features are no longer supported. The main one you might miss is Digests. These were the emails you could sign up for so you didn't have to visit the site. New ways of doing things might make this less of a problem. I'll add more details here later.
The good news is that we also have some new features, like easy media embedding.
Thank you all for your patience over the past couple of days, and a big thank you to everyone who contacted me to let me know the site was broken. It would have taken longer to fix had you not alerted me, and it was also encouraging to know you are out there waiting.

Neil

[Michael Szabo]

Thanks for the update Neil, and good on you for rebuilding, that must have been no mean feat!
I like the new colour scheme.
Cheers,
Michael

[Neil Fitzgerald]

The attack against us resumed this afternoon and you may have noticed the site went down again. Blocking more IP address seems to have helped but this may be a recurring thing for a while. Please bear with me.

[UreweraBlueDuck]

Thanks for all your work Neil. Like you say, let's hope this all goes away.