After a brief period of some improvement in response times it appears the site is once again stuck in molasseses and I’m not entirely sure what the problem is. Rendering the main page is taking several minutes to complete (225.24 seconds last time I tried it) compared to the backend which, while sluggish, is still rendering in a reasonable period of time (3.19 seconds to pull up the entry form I’m writing this with for example) so I suspect that SEB may be getting hammered by spammers at the moment. Being at work and thusly unable to connect to my server thanks to the firewall I can’t check the logs to see what’s going on, but perhaps I can bug Elwed to take a gander soon.

Speaking of which, Elwed, DS and I are looking to move our sites to a dedicated server we’re all going to chip in on in the not too distant future. The hope is that with a decent server dedicated to just our sites—as opposed to the VPS solution we’re currently using where it’s shared among a lot of other clients—we’ll have more horsepower dedicated to dealing with the hammering the sites take from spammers and the various search engine spiders. More info on that as things develop.

Update: It does appear to be spammers as there’s a crapload of different domains hitting various old threads with URLs that include pages about car insurance services even though the domains involved have nothing to do with cars or insurance. Appears another spammer has bought out loads of defunct domain names and is spam farming with them. The amount of time and effort those assholes waste driving other people’s servers into the ground really pisses me off.