Let’s get this out in the open I have been building Operating Systems for 16 Years. I own multiple websites and am very used to seeing heavy traffic. Even with Russia, that is lite to me. I suggest you read this article.

The forum is back up and 100% functional, err 99% functional. EDIT: 05/04/2022: The email portion is not working. I need to update the DNS settings for the server, I approved all your accounts manually. When I say this I suggest you make no mistake. I have the ability to be patrolling the forum and you never know I am there, same with all admin and moderators. I will be there minimally for the next 2 weeks daily. I am disapproving of the 13,000+ topics 1,000 per day the Russian bots put in place. I will fix the MX DNS issue tomorrow. I am betting that is gone. Check the “A” record. I have been very busy. The forum will be up under Cloudflare before I go back to Programming / OS Architecture.

I am sorry it took so long. I found the problem was that Russian Bots were swarming the website. 218,251 hits from the Russian Federation in less than 3 days. I am sorry I had to go to extremes to fix that first before fixing the actual website.


Let me tell you how I fixed that first. I am sorry to plagiarise myself from FaceBook:

You do understand I used to be a hacker right? Proper term is a cracker.

• a person who breaks into a computer system, typically for an illegal purpose.” computer crackers will push the outer limits of network security”

I want you to look at the second screen. Watch Mother Russia vacate my site. I am not worried about the functionality of the website right now. I want them GONE!!! These are not small domains they feed the internet, all from Russia initially. In the USA it is called ARPA.

I pulled down a database of Russian IP’s used 4 commands:
cat banlist | tr ' ' '\n' > banlist <<- this command split the IP addresses into single IP per line
sed -i 's/^/deny from /' banlist <<– This command goes to the beginning of the line and inserts deny from
sed 's/$.0/.*/' banlist <<-Searches for .0 from the end of each line and replaces them with wildcards. Blocking potentially 65,025 domains at a time. Per line and there are 4,237 lines in code.
I did not stop there.
sed -i 's/\.255\>/.*/g' banlist <<- this was probably too “Greedy” That probably banned millions in one sweep because of the /g meaning global.

At the end of the day, I banned the entire country. Sorry, Russia. I do think I may have hit a couple in Finland as well. A few bad Apples will screw things up for all.


I am sorry for 2 reasons.
1. I blocked any of our Russian users.
2. Potentially blocked other users we have in other countries such as Finland.

Then I fixed the website 😉

The New hosting company is THE BOMB! Please note I did use an affiliate link. They transferred and set up the website for me. I used the “Honey” addon and it saved me almost $400.00 for a 4-year plan. I was not going to do that, but it saves you 20%. I do not want the money.

Do you have a website? I am going to provide you with the ban list I generated. All you need to do is open your .htaccess (hidden file) file and add that to the beginning of the file. I have been asked, what are you going to do when China does the same? I will rinse and repeat. I can promise you it stops right now, they are wondering how I did that. They actually want to know how I got that list. Ukraine is rolling on the forum as if they own it. Safe haven, I am happy to provide. Even if it is virtual. I am probably the last guy you want to mess with.

Enjoy your website back,

TheeMahn,