Staving off a bot swarm

Many apologies for the lag and downtime this morning and afternoon! Around 10am PST, the site was swarmed by a horde of spam bots. There's always a few dozen spam bots we fend off every hour, but this was a spike almost verging on a denial of service attack.

I don't want to jinx anything, but the storm finally seems to be abating. The silver lining is that we're coming out on the other side with further strengthened site infrastructure.

To apologize to our supporting members who tried to access the site this morning and couldn't, I'm extending all active memberships by 3 days.

Thank you all for your patience during this.