I’d say that creating a sock without permission - even in extremis - has the potential to place your posting privileges in jeopardy and it’s not recommended.
Far better to contact the staff and ask about such troubles unless it’s been otherwise stated clearly that socking is allowed.
That’s why we call alternative IDs that don’t engage in sock-puppet behavior “alts” where i come from…
But i can’t imagine the alt IDs actually helped much. Didn’t they also have trouble logging on the second time they were used?
Anyhow, things do look normal, now. Thanks to those who had to work over the weekend to make that happen.
Thanks to John and others behind the scenes for spending part of their Sunday putting things right. We’re hopeful all is now back to normal and that we’re protected against further attacks. We’ll find out what we can about who was behind this but experience suggests it won’t be much.
One odd thing just happened.
I submitted a post and immediately got a “duplicate post” with some 5 minute warning thing. The latter I understand, but not the former.
But even odder: The post went thru. No need to wait.
No, I didn’t double click the submit button.
Just a hiccup?
I had to log in a couple times this morning but this afternoon not at all. Thanks so much for the hard work!
Is it even worth the effort to try to find who was behind it? Seems like it would be better to spend time fortifying protection than giving some loser that much attention.
But whatever, thanks. 
So … will The Master now refrain from answering questions about the NSA?
Mine had trouble the first time. I was never able to log in at all, with or without socks.
I’m sure this has already been pointed out somewhere but --------- we’ve had at least one real banning and a thread complaining about a mod action.
So clearly we are back to normal! 
Since this morning it has been touch and go for me. Anyone else having problems?
About an hour ago I tried looking at the board for the first time today and got a server error, then it seemed to be working but very slow. But that only lasted a short time and all seems normal now.
Board works sometimes, other times i get 503 errors. Been like this for past 90 minutes or so.
I got errors all morning too
All okay on my end. No troubles today.
Ditto on server errors.
Board and main site was down for a bit earlier for me this morn.
Yeah, 503 error. Really slow when it did work. REALLY slow.
Getting 503 errors and slowdowns now.
From the sounds of it, it’s been up and down since this morning. It’s been pretty much unavailable for nearly an hour til just now. I wonder if this sort of intermittent behavior is just what a DOS/DDOS attack might look like.
Ditto here. Web server 503 errors, also CloudFront CDN errors trying to access webserver.
Could be DDOS, could just be DB or webserver faults. :mad:
Or not.