“I’ve always wanted to peek under the hood of one of these bad boys.”

Had trouble logging on and posting recently? I know I have. And hey, I’d be the last person to engage in conspiracy theories so I’m simply going to point out that this website came under sustained and determined attack from would-be hackers just a day or so after my rant about how dodgy phoenix scheme developers should be jailed for fraud.

Coincidence?  Of course it is.

However, this exposed some system overload issues and in an effort to deal with them, we are now running this website through a system called Cloudflare, which should speed things up as well as protecting the website and making it safer for all of you to interact with us and each other.

This should improve page loading times and sharply reduce the number of active spammers. However, initially, some but not all of you may get a challenge page before you are granted access to the site.

You will still  be able to access the forum by passing the captcha test, and you will be able to request whitelisting of your IP address, meaning you never get hassled again. Only a small number of you will see the challenge page which is used to stop automated bots from accessing the site.

The challenge page will also appear if there are indications that your machine is infected with a computer virus or malware. The best thing to do is to run an anti-virus scan on your machine as a precaution.

Cloudflare tell us that sometimes there are false positives with the data, but it is most common when the visitor is coming from a shared network like an office, college network or coffee shop. This means is that although your computer isn’t infected, someone else on the same network does have an issue.

So, if you can, run an anti-virus scan as a precaution. If there is no virus or malware, then you can enter the CAPTCHA to access the forum.

Thanks for your patience.  It’s a sad fact that some of the people who make our daily lives more difficult in the strata-sphere often have the time, skills and inclination to undermine what we do online.

Fingers crossed, we’ve got it sorted.