Website outage

[Forceflow]

Okay, as you can hopefully see we are back online. I finally got a hold of the right person about the issue with my provider and access to the database was granted again.
It was taken offline because of a high load it was using, most likely because an AI crawler bot was scrapping the forum for all it's worth. There's a high chance that this cause a spike in traffic that lead to the disabling of the database. Since that is an integral part of not only the forum but the page itself that meant nothing was working anymore.

I split the setup of the main page and the forum, so that in case the forums DB gets locked again the page will stay up and function normally.

In order to prevent the DB being locked again I had to take some rather annoying steps however. Except for the Announcements & Release Notes section of the forum everything is locked behind an account. So if you want to read the forum you will have to have an account and be logged in. I wish this wasn't necessary, but I don't know how else to protect he page. (Other than throwing a lot of money at the problem) I also found another trick that might help keep the bots at bay, but that's always going to be a case of whack-a-mole that eventually I will loose.

Let's hope things stay up again and sorry to all for the inconvenience.

[Original Post]
[UPDATE from 2024/04/25 16:39 UTC]So most of the page functionality is back up again. News, Showcase, progress and downloads are all back up and running for now. The forum is still down and as of right now I have absolutely no idea when that will back. On the backup front I do have a working backup from the 2024/04/24 afternoon, so at least any kind of data loss would be limited to about 12 hours. Still sucks, but at least the vast majority of stuff is recoverable. Unfortunately until I know what happened and if I can get the most up-to-date state of the DB (which should still be there, I just cannot access it) there's really no point for me to move forward right now.
Really sorry about all of this, I hope to be able to have everything back up running on the weekend.[/UPDATE]

Okay, so as some of you may have noticed the page and the forum were down for most of the day and functionality of the page really isn't there anymore.
It was not an attack of any sort but it is an ongoing issue with my provider. Unfortunately it's something that is currently completely out of my hands to solve. To make matters worse I realized that my primary backup function had an issue as well. So while I do have a backup available from yesterday morning it's not nearly as up-to-date as it should be.
I will try my best to get anything up and running, but real life is unfortunately also heavily interfering right now.

Right now the only thing really working is the newspage, so I will keep you guys updated here. You can head over to the TFTC Discord Server as well, some of us are reachable there.

[rogue518]

Forceflow... I am glad you are back up.... I was stunned there for a minute... but realized some kind of glitch must have happened. I am sure everyone will be glad, to me.. one of the Best Star Wars Upgrade mod website's out..

Sincerely, Rogue 518