This morning, most of our users were banned from the network. This was the result of my error and I am truly sorry.

I had added a spamfilter to the network to try to block a swarm of bots that were joining the network. Since the first filter did not work, I removed it and added a second one. This occurred at 9:11am EST. Promptly, most of our users were removed from the network with the message "Spambots not wanted". This also affected most of our network staff.

Visitors to the website and our forums trying to find out what happened brought the webserver to its knees. Unfortunately, with the webserver unresponsive, most of our server admins were not able to rehash their servers and add exemptions for themselves so they could work on correcting the issue.

Thanks to network staff, the issue was resolved completely by 10:22am EST.

This incident highlighted several different things:

• Sometimes we all make mistakes.
• Server admins should be exempted from spam filters so they can quickly address any issues with filters that arise.
• Servers should not be dependent on the webserver to rebuld their configurations.
• The webserver needs better hardware to handle an onslaught of visitors.

We are currently working on how to approach the technical issues.

I am going to take steps to make sure I do not repeat this. For starters, I am going to avoid doing anything with the spam filters until I have a reliable mechanism for testing them first.

Again, I'm truly sorry this happened. Please accept my apologies.

As part of our continuing efforts to improve service in North America, we have accepted logik.nj.us.synirc.net as a test link, donated by darkex. This server is located in New Jersey, USA.

The French provider for hades.fr.eu.synirc.net shut down without notice. Aden has moved the server to another provider in Germany and the new hades.de.eu.synirc.net is undergoing the test link process.

We will be updating the software running on our North American hubs in the next two weeks to hopefully address an issue where some client servers are becoming desynchronized with the rest of the network.

Our secondary North America hub will be upgraded this coming weekend on Saturday, 24 September. The hub will only be offline for a few minutes and should have minimal impact.

Our primary North America hub will then be upgraded the next weekend on Saturday, 01 October. We will try to move servers off that hub ahead of time so there will be smaller splits throughout the week rather than one huge split as the hub goes down.

hades.de.eu.synirc.net has been moved to a new provider in France. The server is now hades.fr.eu.synirc.net and is currently going through the testing process.

Jake, the previous co-admin of downtown.tx.us.synirc.net, has taken ownership of that server. The previous admin, Aden, will stay on as co-admin.

We have upgraded the website forums. These should perform better and correct issues that were present in the previous version of the software. The forums are also now SSL-enabled.

There may still be some issues with the new forum software. If you encounter any, please let us know in the Website/Forums Support forum.

We are also working on a new theme for the forums that will better match the rest of the website.

We forgot to mention that Aden has gracefully donated a second server, hades.de.eu.synirc.net, for our European pool. This server was accepted as a test link on 19 June 2011 and was promoted to a full link on 27 July 2011.

We will be conducting maintenance on network services around 9am EDT on Tuesday, 28 June 2011 to upgrade network services to the newest available stable version. Services will be offline for the upgrade but this should take no more than a few minutes. No registrations should be affected.

As part of the upgrade, we will be aliasing /ns sendpass to /ns resetpass so /ns sendpass works as expected, even with the encrypted services passwords.

Months in the making, we have finally launched our redesigned site. We hope that this site will be more useful to current and prospective users.

In the near future, we're planning to roll out further enhancements:

• SSL on the forum and webchat
• Upgrading the forum

If you have any further recommendations for the site or if you have any issues, please let us know via the forum.