Hope you don't think I am interfering Peter but I don't often look in the Rules and Announcement section and wondered if many others do. With these thoughts in mind I have copied your update about the recent outage to this section of the forum.

Hi,

We experienced some down time today that was caused by a suspected attack or high load that caused the server to fall over and the database to be corrupted. This was repaired fairly quickly as I happened to be browsing the forum.

I hate to do this but this is also an opportune time to remind any one that reads this site runs through donations and Chris's, Ged's and my time also all you happy posters We got a free half year of server running due to a host created outage a little while back but funds are low for this year. The server costs £130 a year and is up for renewal this month but we only have £56 in donations. If you can only afford a £1 it's something.

Thank you to all that have donated so far and thanks for reading this.

Kind Regards
Peter

Thanks - we appreciate all the efforts to keep this forum operating!
I just made a donation by the link at the top but it seemed to insist that I donate in US dollars with no apparent way to change it to £ - is this normal???

His payPal account is in dollars .

The donation page was set up when Peter was in the USA. Some members say it converts back to £ upon transfer. I personally just send my donation directly to Peters own email address as Friends & Family to avoid any transaction charges.

Pay pal conversion rates are quite small plus his payment to service provider may be in Dollars anyway .Not worth worrying about it's just pennies .Main thing is to donate

its easy to donate in dollars or not, so no excuse, if we all donate a fiver, happy days to keeping this great forum running.
A big thanks from me to the admins.

Yep, I'll donate. Give me a moment!

Edit: Done! $3 turned out to be £2.54 when I donated. If you guys need more money you'll have to ask.

With thanks to site owners and Peter, Chris, Capitano and all the other mods. Thanks to Muddy for drawing our attention to it.

Ian

Whilst we're talking about the forum platform, I've noticed recently that my address line for this forum website - at the top of the page - shows a red triangle with '!', followed by 'Not secure' in red font.

Is the something we should all be worried about?

I've recently made a donation!

muddyfox wrote: ↑Tue Oct 08, 2019 11:22 am Hope you don't think I am interfering Peter but I don't often look in the Rules and Announcement section and wondered if many others do. With these thoughts in mind I have copied your update about the recent outage to this section of the forum.

Thanks for doing this muddy

Just to add to previous info:
I believe the forum and therefore the server is being mass searched by a bunch of bots either trying to get info or register. During summer we were seeing a lot of registrations from dodgy email accounts so we put in measures to reduce this as dealing with is was getting really tedious. Whilst these measures worked in stopping registrations the bots are still trying to visit and it seems to have increased subsequently overloading the server yesterday. I have removed a couple of features available to guests, including the search function, to reduce server load. Guests will still be able to search via google and therefore find the site, as google bots and other trusted search engine bots have a form of user account.

As for the not secure thing, it's nothing to worry about really.

Thank you all for the donations, it has covered quite a bit extra.

Done!
It's a bit early in the day for me so I got confused - I have donated $7.00 which at today's exchange rate is £5.96.