Kaironews was shut down tonight by our ISP for very excessive use of CPU resources on the server. I believe the problem was caused by spammers and ill-behaved search engines (I found one such instance of the latter).
Since those of us who use the site don't want this to happen, I've
- Temporarily enabled the bad behaviour module. This blocks some spammers at the Drupal level; it may or may not help reduce CPU usage.
- Banned the offending IP range which occupied 11 of the top IP's in terms of page visits this month at Kairosnews and used .99 GB's of the 4.7 GB's used this month. (Sorry Platypus Matt. If that happens to be you using multiple computers at your insitution to see if anyone replied to your posts, you are now effectively blocked at the server level ;-) )
- Limited news aggregator and search access to logged in members.
- Enabled Drupal's caching and throttling mechanism for anonymous users. If you are logged in, it won't affect you. But if you visit Kairosnews without logging in, you may not see the most recent content as Drupal will pull some pages directly from its cache. This should help as these tools were designed specifically for drupal.org and other popular sites using Drupal to survive a Slashdotting.