If you've experienced poor performance over the past few hours:

Microsoft's "bing" crawler is hitting the site at crazy rates, trying to work out how to fix this...

I added some more performance monitoring software for the web server.

Also finding that a bot called "mj12" has been hitting the site at crazy rates,
and _exclusively_ trying to retrieve (mostly outdated) Russian puzzle pages

.. and this evening the load went up a lot because a server from Hong Kong tried to hack
the forum software with an "SQL injection attack"

There is some software running that analyzes log files and blocks servers on suspicious activity,
I need to extend this to also check the web server logs

Hurray, yesterday finally 24 hours of normal load



edit: there was only one short hacking attempt this morning, from Columbus, Ohio, this time.