What the heck happened? The forum was impossible to access now it is okay?

[Kern Dog]

I'm glad that the site is still up and running. I do wish that more enthusiasts chimed in though.
I never claimed to know or understand what it takes to run a site like this from the managerial and financial side but I have chatted with forum moderators of other sites.
If a site is not advertising or charging any fees, then it must be fully paid for by someone. I do appreciate that Troy has kept the lights on. If one is self funding a site, it seems like a high traffic count may not be a top priority since no advertisers exist, clients that pay rates based on the site traffic.
It is great that we are not bombarded with ads. I've been on sites that do flood the pages with half page ads, Moparts is one that was infected with Infolinks, whatever the heck that was...
Being self funded can be good and bad though.
Sure, you are not held hostage to the standards and practices of the tech overlords but....some contributing members that stepped outside of the rules too many times get shut out as Troy mentioned above. Fewer members seems to have led to a downward spiral. It must be tough to balance as a site owner....tolerate a member that is sometimes annoying but otherwise an asset OR just ban the guy and watch others quit coming around since traffic has slowed down. I state that because I am fully aware that I can be abrasive and annoying but I am also quite willing and able to help where I can.  I suspect that I would have been locked out for good if not for Troy being forgiving while also seeing that I am not always a pain in the ass.
Birds and Bees is a member at FBBO and FABO under the screen name DadsBee. He is a solid contributor and a great asset to the hobby but some software glitch has him locked out. I have seen a few of the members here pop up at FBBO since the traffic slowed down. Why is it that those sites have not seen such a huge drop off in traffic? I am not blaming Troy for anything here, I just wonder what they are doing right if they thrive while other sites are fading.

[Troy]

Without having access to the logs, I can only guess. This site isn't the only forum to get hammered by social media. Even Roadkill mentioned it in an episode (the death of forums). A forum may look "active" but the numbers are likely a fraction of what they used to be. Early on, this site was pushing 2.5 million visits per month. There's 40 GB of images uploaded (and early on we had that limited to 4 pictures per post at 200 kB each). The database takes about 7 hours to restore. Lack of income isn't much of a problem for a site that uses no resources - but bandwidth, disc space, and memory all cost money. Think of it like a bullet train. A freight train can handle massive loads but not get you anywhere fast. A Bugatti can get there fast but only if you want to take a small child and a Snicker's bar. The busier the site is the more it costs.I made a decision a long time ago to buy a server outright. A similar cloud hosted server would be ~$120-200/mo. Backups/storage, mail hosting, security certificates, management software, etc. add another $80ish/mo. I have a few other "web sites" (not forums) and I can run them all on a $6/mo server. 

"Free" also generally comes with caveats. Facebook makes their money by selling stuff to you and selling your information to everyone else. The "community" isn't anywhere near the top of their list of priorities. This community has always been way better. Except it won't let you upload your 40 megapixel photo directly from a cell phone without "being too hard". The people here are generally pretty awesome with only a few exceptions.

The login troubles have to do with a few things. Spammers/hackers used to use a fairly predictable attack method and most of the attacks came from large server farms - which have addresses like neighborhoods and could be blocked. However, these same server farms are where all those wonderful VPNs that people like to use are located so legitimate members get a false "banned" message. But then the bad guys started taking advantage of hacked personal devices and some address spoofing and they only method to stop them was to be overly aggressive and block large chunks of the world from access. Many members traveling to other countries found this out the hard way. AI tools have made even the dumb hackers much more of a problem than ever before. The email being broken means no one can use the "lost password" functionality of the site. And no one can report or send me a direct message because I won't get it. I have new accounts set to require approval. There are probably 800-1000 bogus accounts for each real one. It takes a lot of effort to weed through them by hand. Maybe I'll offload that task to AI?

I don't know what may be causing intermittent performance problems. I'll look into it. Sometimes it's just the internet in general (or localized outages). The server is in NY so if there's a big storm on the east coast it could cause an issue no matter where you are located.

Troy