I, too, have had some strangeness accessing the forums and website (forums.sinsofasolarempire.com and www.sinsofasolarempire.com). It was fine yesterday morning (local Swedish time), but after lunch I suddenly couldn't reach the website (or forums). Of some reason, I put it down to network problems. So, I changed my DNS, and I could reach the sinsofasolarempire.com sites again.

Today (Saturday) I have had similar problems but only with the forums.

My guess is that something happened around the ol' Internet that upset some of our DNS. Temporarily confusing them about sinsofasolarempire.com. If so, it should be all right very soon. If not, it may be a deliberate sabotage by scared competitors in the gaming industry...

It's normally related to the software or database the forums run on. This is a custom piece of forum software and therefore there will be some bugs or glitches to work out. It happens with all custom coded websites that don't use cookie-cutter products for purchase and licensing.

The "Server too busy" thing started for me Friday at around 5pm EST and is still going on today. However, I would guess that there are less people trying to get to the forums right now and that's helping what little capacity a crippled system has become available for me to use.

Query intensive pages on this site appear to be bogged down by something, so perhaps it's time to run some table optimization or go hunting around in the code for what threw a shoe and toppled over. Good luck!

For everyone trying to visit the forums, we might have to wait until Monday to get a fix to this btw.

Thanxxx a lot for your Saturday-afternoon zeal !

It's a great forum, for a great game : lots of info & debates to digest.

DOS as in denial of service attack?

Yea, out of all the websites on the net why the heck would someone go after this one?

Any word yet on the status of who (or what) is doing it?

They don't need a reason. Sometimes it's targeted and sometimes it's not. There are people literally actively hunting for any security lapse on any hardware or software in order to exploit it for their purposes.

I remember when the university I worked for got DOS attacked. Unfortunately, the attacker(s) didn't realize we were also an ISP with a smart, industry-hardened faculty. Attacking the people who wrote books on networking and such is beyond stupid. Imagine the surprise of someone in Montreal, Canada when they got their net disconnected and were arrested because we were able to connect the dots, communicate with the right contacts, and go digging through all the attempts to cover his/her path. Ouch. I felt like I was on a TV show like CSI though!