Yes, the forum has been down.

[Steve Ashton]

I humbly apologize that over the past week the site has been disrupted.

It began with random outages and then a complete shut-down.

Here is a copy of the response I got from our host about what was going on and causing this.

"Hi Steve,your site has been under attack by thousands of bots from countries like vietnam, morroco, pakistan, brazil and others. I've tried block those countries but they just start from another country. I moved the forum folder to _forum hoping they would go away but as soon as I re-enable the forum folder the attack starts again. I'm still working on this.
Christine"

You may notice that the attacks come from one country and then another. This is why I do not like Virtual Private Networks's (VPN's) or the Apple iCloud Private Networks. Almost all hacks are coming through these supposed secure networks when they are some of the least secure ways to access the internet.

A VPN, the way and reason they were originally set up was to allow traveling execs to access their company's network remotely. This was a one-to-one connection that could be very secure.
But today they are totally different. You subscribe to a VPN service that bounces your connection all over the world through foreign servers in an attempt to make the site you wish to visit think you are located somewhere else.

This is good if you are wishing to stream movies while bypassing copyrights. It is good if you are trying to surf porn and want to try to hide your location.
But the truth is, many VPN subscription services contract with as many different servers as they can. Most use the number of servers in their advertising. But they just contract to bounce your connection through those servers, they don't control them. Some of the most popular servers there actually owned by the same Hackers, Spammers, and Bots that caused our recent outage. Some hackers will piggyback onto your connection and follow where you go and what sites you visit giving them another target for their trash.
In the last 22 days, (or since 1 July) There were 1126 attempted regisrations to the forum. Of those, only 3 were legitimate new members.
The rest were Hackers, Spammers, or Bots and all but 4 tried to hit us using what is advertised as a secure VPN or Apple iCloud Private Rely.

Some of you have learned that when your VPN or Apple iCloud is active, you cannot access X Marks. If you turn those off, you can again. This is how we try to keep you safe from these people while you enjoy X Marks. There are published lists of some Hackers and Spammers. I use these lists to block access to the forum from them when they are known.

We began to notice that the amount of traffic from Hackers and Spammers increased in the months before the 2016 US Federal election. The amount of traffic increased a thousand fold in the months leading up to the 2024 election. And has been increasing ever since. Coincidence, perhaps, but from where the traffic is coming from, highly unlikely.

Again, I apologize for the recent outage. Our hosting site is aware and keeping an eye on us. I am aware and doing what I can.

Everyone keep safe. The internet is not a benign, Beaver Cleaver, place.