[John]

So the past 2 weeks didn't turn out anything like what I expected. I thought I was in the home stretch with only a few hours left to go with all this. But turned out there was still lots for me to do, configure & generally figure out.

Then, when I finally was ready to reopen GC... that's when the bots showed up. Literally, within a minute of reopening there would be hundreds of connections & GC would slow to a crawl. I tested reopening GC a number of times over the past few days. Sometimes it would only be 15 to 20 seconds before the site became unusably slow. I had to keep GC offline just so it was fast enough to work on.

I've been working on this new server (+ software upgrades & other additional tech) project for GC since late March. Probably around 50% of my time. GC is now running on the new server which I have setup way differently than the old server. GC should be significantly improved with this new backend tech stack.

There's still more to come for GC. I have a to-do list a mile long.

GC has been back online for approx 45 minutes and things are looking great so far.

Lots of things on the backend have changed so please let me know if you run into any errors or other issues on the site.

Please also help test things out by clicking around and posting some messages & threads.