I peeked in last night just before I went to bed at 10:30- 10:45 and it showed 627 people online here. Can that be right?
It was 613 then it went to 627. I wonder if it was because of the Prince Harry and Meghan Markle post? People may have been Googling them.
That was probably a DDOS attack, intended to crash the server. Most of the pings to the server won't show up as people online but some of them do.
I know you have mentioned some kind of attacks before, @Ken Anderson . But, IMO, people don't do anything unless there is some kind of reward for doing it. What reward would attackers get for crashing your server?
I don't think it's directed at the forum at all. They are trying to disrupt the Internet in the United States with random attacks. I think we just end up in the line of fire. Because of it, everyone has to pay for way more bandwidth and resources than they would otherwise need, just so their site doesn't go down during an attack.