Hello everyone! Bigstack here with another "behind the scenes" update!
If you've been living under a ro-- err... ehem. If you haven't noticed, recently over the past couple of weeks, the site has been down or very slow on occasion. This is due to a wave of SYN and DDoS floods, among other types of attacks that have been directed at us. I spent many long sleepless nights fighting with a firewall and rebooting the server in hopes of being able to gain control of the situation. It seems like there's been a rash of attacks in the Halo community of late, and HaloCustoms is just one of them!
After speaking with other colleagues on the subject, we came up with some successful solutions that can handle small to mid-level attacks. I won’t go into detail about how the new system works but it is proving to be effective, to say the least. However, that said some legitimate users are getting banned… If this happens to you, PLEASE DO NOT PANIC -- it will only last 10 minutes. If this does happen, please send me a message (BigStack), and we can figure out why it happened. Sadly, the security that we have implemented is very strict and false positives happen.
As of this morning we have upgraded to a new server that “should” be better suited to handling the attacks.
FUN STUFF
Last month, we added the Maps add-on, which has been seeing some great success! We're very glad we took the time to get that set up. We are continuing to work on yet more improvements on the site. We're working closely with 343 and other community sites, and we promise, the best is yet to come!
Now to the part everyone has been waiting for. Last month’s stats! Note that some days will be skewed weirdly due to the attacks ruining our activity.
Some pretty things to look at:
March 2013
Only half way through April, and on track for just about the same as last month's activity!
Weekend warriors!
U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A!
Last but not least, a little sampling of user data for your enjoyment:
