Forum Downtime - The forum is moving

[rich]

Hi all,

Yesterday, starting at 4pm GMT, the forum suffered a comprehensive, well-coordinated DDoS attack. This was a properly distributed attack, meant to disable the site (which it did), not just some script kiddies playing around. We had thousands of open connections blocking ports and exhausting our httpd service, with sustained inbound traffic floods of 20GB per second (the equivalent of saturating a dedicated 40Mbps T3 line).

I spent the entire night working diligently with my host to resolve the problem. As a side effect, the attack also took down other sites hosted on the same server, including the Phaser site. The target, however, was the forum. We finally managed to block the attack, but there were 12 hours of downtime and ripples of it carrying on throughout today. It cost me a lot of time, money, and effort.

Although no-one has claimed to be responsible we have evidence indicating it was related to a previous altercation that took place on the forum. As a result, several things are happening:

1) The forum is moving to a different host. It will be hosted directly by Invision, the company who make the forum software. They are in the process of transferring the forum, and in approximately 6 hours time it will be offline as the transfer takes place. They will retain all member accounts, forum posts and file uploads. Custom plugins will also be kept. My thanks to the Babylon.js team to helping fund this move.

2) The Chat room has been disabled, and will not be bought back after the move.

3) The forum will be offline as the domain name is transferred over the course of this weekend. Honestly, I'd just wait until Monday and come back then.

4) I am personally taking the decision to remove a member of the community a lot of you may know: TrueValhala. To be clear, I do not believe he is responsible for orchestrating the DDoS at all. However, he constantly clashes with other forum members (some of it warranted, some most certainly not), and I am regularly receiving complaints to the point where I cannot ignore them any longer. This DDoS attack was the final straw.

I've given this situation a lot of thought, and for many years I have let his actions slide because it was always just a form of 'passive aggressiveness' and over-reaction, rather than anything malicious, and sometimes it was justified too (he receives his own fair share of vitriol now and again.) If you are one of those who has attacked him in the past, perhaps you helped contribute to his polemical responses? But I've moderated forums for over 20 years now, and can confidently say this is one is the most helpful and friendliest ones I've had the pleasure to be part of, and I'm not willing to let it be negatively impacted like this any longer. I'm genuinely upset it had to come to down to this. I know a lot of you follow TV and admire his work, and personally, I admire greatly what he has achieved with html5 on a business level. I'm only writing about him here because I know a lot of you will ask why he is 'banned', I didn't wish to single him out, but he's a prominent part of the community, and you don't just remove that without justifying it first. I genuinely wish him the best for the future and hope he can find another forum to share his insights on, for when you strip away the scathing elements, what is left is usually really informative.

You're welcome to email me directly about any of this.