I would like to apologize for the various technical issues with the forum. In no particular order:
- Logins have been somewhat dodgy for a long time, because PHP isn't configured to recognize the reverse proxy server. This means that the forum thinks that every single user comes from the same IP address. Theoretically, I knew how to fix this, but I've forgotten the details.
- The forum is running on a t2.small, at a cost of $20/month. (There's another $40 a month for the database and other infrastructure.) But a t2.small cannot keep up with all the badly-written web crawlers that try to index the forum too aggressively. (I'm looking at you, Yandex. You were completely banned in robots.txt and you're still killing the forum.) The froum needs at least an m3.medium at $50/month, just to keep up with the crawlers. And that's more than I'm willing to pay. I'm planning to transfer budgetary control over the forum to rdearman sometime soon, because $60/month for all these years is my absolute limit. I love this community, but I've done my part financially. Please, everybody, work with Rick to figure out how to pay for the forum. My guess is that you'll need $90/month to survive the crawlers. It might be worth setting up a Patreon so that people can contribute $5/month instead of just making lump sum payments, beause the bill comes due every month.
- rdearman tried to upgrade to a brand-new phpBB last night sometime. Unfortunately, the forum's build and deployment tools haven't been used in a while, and they don't work very reliably. And so the upgrade broke the forum. I'm trying to update the deployment tools to run reliably again, but uh, a lot has changed. I've gotten to forum back online for the moment.
Once again, my apologies for the technical problems. The single biggest challenge is performance (all those 5xx errors), which will require money to fix.