This is a problem at the moment. I don't know how technical you are, but I'll give the explanation for (hopefully) both laymen and technical people. I do want to say that I turned the tweet reader portion of the bot back on and it is reading your tweets and sticking them into the DB, it is just the display which isn't working at the moment.
Because we got hacked by a code injection attack on the old server we've had to migrate the services to a different machine. The new machine is on the Amazon Cloud and provides us with a ton of benefits like faster database access and other things. As part of this migration to the new server we decided to change the way we do business. The main change was to recreate the services as docker instances. A docker container is an open source software development platform. Its main benefit is to package applications in “containers,” allowing them to be portable among any system running linux. They are also self-contained so a problem with one container (or hack) doesn't effect the others. With docker containers we can deploy the website quickly after change to the code, additional plugins, or rebuild and go backonline within minutes of getting attacked.
So every site we sponsor, the forum, the blog and the super challenge site has to be packaged up into it's own container. We've done this packaging up, for most of the sites. But there are a couple of problems with this migration to using docker containers, which we need to overcome. The first is to run independent website containers on the same machine you need a proxy server which will look at the incoming request and decide which container should respond to your request. We'll shortly be putting this live, so that problem will be overcome. So you type in one of our addresses, and the proxy server will redirect it to the right place for you.
The second issue, and this is the one which currently effects the super challenge bot, is because the container is isolated, if you want to schedule a job to run (like picking up your tweet scores periodically) then you need access to the scheduling service on the main server, or you have to create your own scheduling service in the docker instance. So I've been working on linking the superchallenge bot tweet reader into a cron scheduler. Unfortunately life has intervened and I've spent the last couple of weeks travelling around Europe and haven't had much time to work on the docker container.
BTW if you are technical and want to look at this, the source code is on Github and you need to look at the docker fork:
https://github.com/language-learners/superchallengebotYou can create your own twitterbot and contribute!
So the upshot of this all is after emk figures out the proxy, and I figure out the scheduler (crontab) then we'll get them all put back online. I do apologise for the delay in getting this back online.
