BoonEx.com under DDoS attack. UPDATED.

As of now, we are at the second day of fighting with an ongoing DDoS attack. Alex and HFW team managed to relief the situation, but there're still some issues (forum feed, occasional slowdowns), and if the patterns happen to change BoonEx.com may be unavailable for some time.

Fret not though, whatever doesn't kill us, makes us stronger. And this is certainly not a kind of thing/people that may kill BoonEx.

UPDATE:

We have finally managed to take the attack under control. Due to some changes we had to make to traffic management some subdomains didn't work, including those that serve licences verification, download, etc. We're fixing it all now. Some of you may have been unable to login to your admin panel, since BoonEx data couldn't load. This problem occurred before due to BoonEx News RSS and license verification. We removed this dependancy some time ago, so Admin panels do not depend on RSS feed or license check. Unfortunately we have overlooked version checking mechanism, which still depends on BoonEx.com. We are really sorry about that. Long time ago our intent was to free your admin panel completely, and this is a misfortunate mistake. We are fixing it in 7.0.2 and in your current installation you may use this workaround: ------- set the following setting option to 0: [8/06/10 9:27:16 AM] Alex Trofimov: Admin -> Settings -> Advances Settings -> Other -> Show boonex news in admin panel ------- NOTE: version check and RSS feed in your admin panel are there for good reason. It is the way for us to notify you if there's something urgent, like a security update or a new version. This is not to spam you, but to inform you, and it can be turned off.

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Yeah, weekend sucked, but we've learned a great deal. At the very peak they were firing 50Mbps of traffic at us for a few hours. Somebody must have ordered an expensive botnet attack. We almost feel flattered. 

Takeaways from this weekend:

1. We found a few spots that needed improvement. That will help us writing software that performs better.
2. We learned a few performance-tuning tricks for our dedicated server.
3. Found a good 3rd party protection service.
4. Found that pesky version-checking in admin panel.
5. Made a few notes for upcoming Dolphin releases.
6. Figured that we need to get rid of clutter in some (many) places.

All in all, we're good. On to 7.0.2 preparation.