- Joined
- Apr 16, 2016
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@Ember1205 If I engaged in conspiracy theories I might agree with your assessment of the situation but there is a hughe problem with it. Let's assume that the current owners have the site for the purely altruistic motive of keeping our little community together. Isn't it likely that they would likely want to at least break even on covering the costs of running the site? You can't effectively do that by limiting traffic because that means fewer eyeballs looking at the ads and thus fewer perspective buyers.
In the real world, the goal is more likely to generate at a profit. I have no problem with that but once again how does limiting the traffic in any way lead to a profit.
Who are the current owners at this point? Where is the site being hosted today? What makes up the "Announcement" that was alluded to?
NOTHING has been shared about what all of this means, so it's absolutely impossible to understand what pieces have changed. Given that there is absolutely a functional issue going on here, and everything is hush-hush about what's going on in the background, the assumption has to be made that the site is in the process of being migrated in some fashion. That means a potential change in the entirety of the infrastructure used to deliver the content. And in this case, seems to be alluding to the introduction of a security device (most likely a Web Application Firewall or very similar) that has the power to block specific URL's, certain text strings, etc. and "drop" users from being able to connect based on the assumption that they are trying to do something malicious.
There's nothing wrong with using a product like a Web Application Firewall, but you can't simply drop it into the mix with rules and signatures that were not built for the specific site, and expect it not interfere with the operation of the site. My best guess at this point is that is exactly what is going on here, but again... No one will share any info about what's going on.