20 years ago today, on 10/09/06, I joined the CFN message board and made my first post. I'd been reading the CFN site for a couple years, but I never participated in message boards before and really hadn't even noticed the message board on CFN before that. iirc, I was really put out about the nature of the loss and ire motivated me to join up so I could rant about it to anybody who'd listen.
Never would've guessed I'd spend so many years here, making friends, meeting several posters, yakking about all the ups and downs of cfb and lots of other stuff too.
Twenty years......one more year and I can legally join the beer thread!
I don't recall when I joined CFN- but.... I was desperate for CFB sitting in the sand box... I'd found a site that looked something like those old handheld football games- even had colors for the teams- a little line moving along with the plays and showing field progress... it was as close as i could get to 'live' football... i even subscribed to all the satellites thinking at least one of them may have had it live, but nope... all the Hotbirds, NileSat, et al- not a live game to be seen.
@eltigrerex used to write up a weekend wrap and it became something i trusted more than ESPN or the major carriers. I dunno how i found CFN, but i did... then, they merged with... (well, one of the mergers) and the site combined a UT board i had joined (but couldn't get straight information about the games- just how bad the refereeing was if they lost and how good they were if they won)... that was weird having two worlds shoved together.
anyway.... it's just me behind the curtain, here, insofar as the gadgets that keep this place together... and all it takes is one determined person with bad intentions, or (as it 'could' be) and army of bots, and we go belly up. there is a lot of data to be collected about y'all from over the years. yall tell a little bit here and then a little bit there- someone getting into that and focusing on an individual (it's too easy nowadays having AI draft up a script to drill down to collect specific things- like maybe someone is looking to buy a car and mentions it, and the bot would know exactly what car to advertise to you and what color for that matter) could come up with pure gold.
i don't know that is what happened yesterday and several weeks prior- if it was a bot or person or even where they're from... they/it use a proxy and come at us in waves and legions wide and legions deep- 78k connections to the DB yesterday within a one minute window- certainly a DDoS attempt, likely looking to take the server over and use it to go after even more servers.. i don't know... i just work here. it's frustrating and it tweaks me pretty bad when it happens.
edited to add: so far, and to my knowledge- nobody has gotten in, ever. the server crashes under a certain load and purposely so and that load is before the veils are even touched. it would take quite a bit more force to get in than we've encountered.... they likely figure this site is on a shared environment or a VPN and are confounded they can't get it in... while it's a dedicated server with some serious horsepower- and the reason the damn thing costs so much... btw: thank all of y'all for your donations to keep it running. it means a lot.
