I will soon be accquiring a dedicated server from OVH US, and was wondering if you'd like the chat to be hosted there. It has a 100Mbps unmetered port and will be using the server for multiple things so chat won't be the only thing on it. Interested?

Wow, that is one heck of a server!

As far as hosting, the HWG server should still be meeting our needs in the long run. The chat is currently down while we pretty much rebuild HWG from the top. I contacted hosting this morning, and they said there was no problem with it, although I had to shut down the chat this morning while that was going on with them for stability reasons. The chat remains down while the upgrades are taking place due to the fact that all of the software upgrades are making the server very unstable due to server load, and it is important to keep the bandwidth usage low during the process to help speed things up.

Anyway, the HWG work is on-track so far, and we are making progress over there with the server. If the upgrades fail, we'll figure out what to do from there. My goal is to rebuild HWG the right way, and hopefully that will solve future problems. Needless to say, I've learned an important lesson about using out-of-date software.

Thanks again, -Blake

Are you sure you can keep it this time? You disappointed some people last time your hosting gave out

Well, as Blake mentioned, the problem this time around was a temporary thing related to HardWiredGoogle, which is where chat is hosted. It's not moving any time soon, at least as far as I know and it currently working again (I think).

Yes I know HWG does a great job

Good luck with the rebuild Blake, I wish you luck! And thanks for hosting the chat so far

I think the performance of the chat has greatly improved since the downtime this afternoon. Thanks for your work blake and best of luck with HWG!

Well, the "rebuild" didn't exactly go as planned, but it appears that we solved the problem anyway. I found that some of the spambots were using a back-door to get in. Basically, the phpbb/drupal integration that gives the forums is supposed to direct all user registration to phpBB's registration system. Spambots found they could register just by adding /user/register to the end of the URL and bypass phpBB entirely. This allowed them just to enter a username and email address and register without even having to use a captcha. The spambots that were using phpBB were able to crack the captcha and get in that way as well.

Once this was discovered, it was just a matter of putting anti-spambot questions in the phpBB registration form, and putting not one, but two captchas in the drupal registration form. In addition, we've added a hidden "Website" field to the drupal registration form only spambots can fill. If that field is ever filled, we know it is a spambot that is registering. I've carefully monitored HWG ever since it went back online, and so far it looks like this has pretty much resolved the spambot problem, even though I can't actually disable the registration back-door due to integration problems that could result. (Forgive my technical rambling )

As far as the chat, I do apologize for the inconvenience with its downtime. Finding good chat hosting is definitely not an easy thing to do (Suzaku could tell you this as well) as many hosts do not want chats to be run on their servers. Even if they allow chats, they tend to put a huge load on the server that can slow down everything else on them. (Suzaku could tell you this also) Either way, having the chat hosting is not a guarantee, but we are working very hard to do our best at keeping hosting for it.

Man got some work with those spammers there. Good luck