For the last few days (possibly last couple of weeks to be honest) this site has had very patchy availablility, and it's not my ISP as other users on #maemo (in other parts of the world) have also been unable to access ITT.

Tonight on 22 August (GMT), ITT has been down for a couple of hours - server connection errors, zero byte replies, connection timeouts.

Reggie - are you aware of these problems? Is it a database problem, server stablity issue or even DDoS?

Yes, I'm aware of the problems and am trying to find what's causing it. There are hundreds of spam emails coming in and the built-in mail scanner and spam detector is having a hard time processing them and using the server's full resources several times.

We will try to upgrade to a new server and provider if this thing keeps happening.

Thanks or the post.

I will gladly contribute to costs if it will help.

Well, I do know someone took a gun to one of the main fiber optic cables in Ohio that carries a lot of ISP traffic for the eastern part of the U.S.
I've also noticed the spotty availability across the entire site.

Likewise (within reason!)

It may be a good idea to set up a Paypal account for donations to forum maintainance.

Also, to stay "within reason" , how about setting up some tariffs? Maybe subtle benefits could even be coupled to donations, like a bigger mailbox, or automatic filtering of euchre**** .

Maybe Nokia could contribute...

One would think Nokia would already be footing some of the bills to keep this place going.
It is one of the main knowledge repositories for their Internet Tablet line of consumer devices.

I hope Nokia would! lol

I did change some setting on the server and hopefully it performs better. Let's see how it does on the next few days. Thanks for all the offers to help.

Even indirectly...