Server maintenance

As you may have noticed the site’s been up and down a lot lately. This is because of spam attacks that have forced us to take things offline temporarily to clean up back-end databases.

As a result, I’ve now upgraded Hub a little to use a more modern reCaptcha anti-spam engine. It might be difficult to use with NetSurf – turn JavaScript off entirely & you might have a chance; otherwise you’ll have to try and use one of the “mainstream” browsers or contact ROOL to help. Of course if you’re reading this, you probably don’t need to sign up anyway :-)

Another reason for downtime is overdue updates to the server software running at the back-end. I’m running through a series of version bumps, testing as I go. This isn’t something I can do on a development branch using spare ports, since it’s the core server software itself. Ordinarily I’d try to do this during off-peak times but these days I live in New Zealand so my off-peak is your prime time!

Apologies for any disruption, but hopefully after all this the site will be generally more secure and generally more resistant to spam (though it’ll still happen from time to time, of course).