If you are overseas and having been having issues with our forums since Sunday, odds are you’re getting hit by a new system rigged up to deal with a huge wave of bot issues our servers been experiencing for the past few weeks. This is especially an issue if you are in Russia, South America, or are in Italy using Telecom Italia. I’m looking into figuring out more ways to “teach” our firewall to let legitimate users through while stopping malicious bots (for instance, Yandex now works correctly with the site whereas it was having issues earlier.)
If this is happening to you, you can help me out significantly by sending me an e-mail (scarredsun at sonicretro dot org) with your forum username (if you have an account) and the lines “Your User Agent” and “Your IP” from http://whatsmyuseragent.com. If I can at least get some objective cases out of the tens of thousands of IPs that are in the logs, I can work towards fixing this. Please note that even if you do not visit the forums, I need you to check to see if you are getting hit. There is the strong possibility that this same system will eventually be implemented on the entire site.
I should be able to process IPs for whitelisting either late tonight or tomorrow, so I apologize for the temporary lockout.