Over the past few weeks, we’ve noticed that the CosmoQuest.org has been running a bit slower than usual. All aspects of our site, from the citizen science projects to the educator resources to the forums had crawled to a near-standstill when it came to page load times. Our programming team, while working on the many projects and tasks to maintain CosmoQuest were now trying to hunt down the cause of a systemic issue that was causing the processors of our servers to completely chug.

Our lead programmer, Cory Lehan and I spent time trying to troubleshoot the issues we were facing, slowly excluding possibilities by testing fixes. There was one that we discussed in a very tongue-in-cheek fashion, but never really thought it would be the case. “What if we’re getting a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack?” It was tongue-in-cheek because we never really thought that someone would want to target CosmoQuest in a way that would try to take it offline. However, when we were getting frustrated and ran out of options to look, we ran some queries on the server and found that certain areas of CosmoQuest was being pinged upwards to 90 times per second– for weeks. I didn’t believe Cory when he told me that’s what it was, but I saw it for myself.

Immediately Cory and I went to work, attempting to mitigate the slowness being done to the site. Tweets were sent out, Facebook posts made, as well as Google+ posts were sent out and your responses, retweets, and shares were overwhelmingly supportive. Eventually we were able to get the majority of the damage controlled. In the process, Cory and I fixed a few of the other technical issues that were running in the background, including the loss of images/buttons from the forum, and authentication issues running with the Tapatalk application. As of this writing, the vast majority of CosmoQuest is running as it should be. We’ll be continuing to monitor the site more closely to ensure nothing like this happens again.

It goes without saying that we are all greatly appreciative of the support of all of you through this time. Also, the CosmoQuest Forum’s Administrators & Moderators have done a fantastic job staying in contact with me while I’m on the road, letting me know of things that are happening with the site. They perform so many tasks behind the scenes that are not seen, but though many would say their voluntary contribution to our community is a thankless one, it is the furthest from the truth. I know that if I did not have “Antoniseb”, “Swift”, and “ToSeek” as admin inside the forum, my tasks would be nearly impossible to be completed.

Thank you all for your patience during this difficult time. If you haven’t taken the time to thank the forum moderators or admin lately for the wonderful work they perform in the forum, please do.