Dude, Where's My Site?

Scott Hardie | March 20, 2023
Two errors have been happening across Funeratic lately:

1) Weird problems with data not showing up on the page correctly, such as the list of Members being blank, or turn data in a Rock Block concert not populating correctly (such as "Turn 1: played to on" instead of "Turn 1: Scott Hardie played Metallica to Stage Right on March 20").

This is my fault. As I mentioned in that concert's comments, I've been undertaking a weeks-long project to clean up, standardize, and simplify the data structure in the database, for the first time in almost 20 years. I've been able to avoid errors for the most part, but a few have come up where I forget about certain unusual data patterns that require some extra steps beyond what I'm doing elsewhere. I'm sorry! This work is worth the trouble to reduce future errors, but there may be some pain in the short term while I continue converting for a few more weeks. I'm correcting as I go, so please alert me to any problems that you encounter on the site, especially if they have to do with data missing on a page.

2) The site becoming inaccessible for a time with 503 Service Unavailable errors, typically for 5-10 minutes but today for over an hour.

This is caused by Russian (judging from their IP address) hackers who are flooding my site with machine-generated attempts to gain control of the server via brute force (submitting every combination of data possible until one unlocks access), and the server's so overwhelmed that it can't serve the site to anyone. Speaking as a professional web developer for many years, hackers used to feel like the bane of my existence, because I lost countless days just fending off relentless bullshit like this, and it similarly affected my personal website as well. I've been lucky for the last decade to have worked at a company that has much more effective safeguards in place, and to have switched to a competent personal web host who also knows how to prevent this kind of abuse and shut it down asap when it does happen, so it's rare that this occurs much any more. But it's been a repeating issue for the last 2-3 weeks for some reason, and I expect it to continue for a little while longer until the hackers move on to some other target. If you want to alert me to another outage, you can reach me via Facebook Messenger or text message. (I think most Funeratic members have my contact info but ask any time if not.)

I appreciate the help, and the patience as this all passes. Thanks!