Problem with access

[Beathan]

I have received this error multiple times this morning trying to access the forums:

General Error
SQL ERROR [ mysqli ]

User forumscds already has more than 'max_user_connections' active connections [1203]

An sql error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact an administrator if this problem persists.

I can try to relog and eventually get through. At the time of the problem, only two other people -- Trebor and Shep -- were logged in in addition to me.

Beathan

[Soro Dagostino]

Tried . . . but this is what I got.

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, [email protected] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

[Trebor Warcliffe]

I think all of us have been experincing this problem today. I did send an IM in-world to Mizou so she should get it when she logs in.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

My apologies... this was hard to track, and unrelated to the forums themselves.

You see, over the years, there have been a lot of experiments with some Web tools, mostly for project management (for the New Guild), some social networking tools, tweaking content management systems to see what works best, and so forth. Unfortunately, I'm usually lazy and forget that these are online and still operational, even if nobody uses them any more (anyone has connected to projects.slcds.info lately? ).

Well, it seems that the domain slcds.info has a lot of traffic... and it easily attracts spammers. They managed to pretty much take hold of a Twitter-like clone I had running on one domain. Unfortunately, because I didn't want to use an additional database, it was sharing the forum database... You can now imagine what happened: gazillions of spammers were on that application, generating traffic like crazy for their ads, and increasing the demand on the database server just for serving ads and links and spam... until there were not enough resources left for the forums to run

Oh well. I cleaned up those never-used sites, and now a lot of spammers are going to be seriously disappointed hehe

In the mean time, my apologies for the interruption in the service.