You may have noticed the CVT website was offline yesterday afternoon/evening. Our web hosting is outsourced to DreamHost, and they manage the servers on which the website lives (the hardware). Yesterday there was a hardware failure on our database server, and this was the cause of the problem. But the DreamHost Geek Squad took care of it, and all is well now!
As for the persistent spammer from the “United Nation” who keeps sending us the harmless but annoying friend requests, that is a separate issue having to do with WordPress and the various plugins and security settings on the website, which I manage. Looking at our recent web traffic, the Germans seem to really enjoy visiting us (as in multiple times per second), but oddly enough I don’t see many Germans on our hikes. So I’m going to take a wild guess and say they are the culprits.
I am trying a couple of things but not making any promises. First, I am blocking web traffic coming Germany. In other words, I’m building a virtual wall and making them pay for it! And second, I have changed the registration process so that new members must be approved before their account is activated. I tried that once before but had some issues with it. I’m trying a different approach this time, so we’ll see how it goes.
Despite these relatively minor issues, our WordPress site is still an improvement over Meetup in terms of uptime. But if we should ever have another long outage (unlikely), you can find us on our Facebook page and group as well. Please continue to let me know if you encounter any issues.
Thanks to everyone for your patience!
Thanks for fixing everything, Brian!