tl;dnr; We've met the bot challenge without resorting to "click here if you're a human" circus. We'll slowly begin making all of the forums public for guests once again!
After the big move (a small move will be scheduled--more below) we were, like the rest of the interwebs, swamped by bot traffic. (Thank AI content harvesting for that!)
The most popular defences have been Cloudflare, etc.. The whole "click" to gain access just seemed too intrusive and we didn't like concept of putting access in the hands of a 3rd party (when their servers go down so does much of the internet), so we sought our own self-hosted solution.
It took a lot of research, and trial and error, but we're currently ahead of the annoying hoard. There will undoubtedly be some more cat and mouse in the future as AI tries new ways to breach our defences (they never sleep!), but for now we're stable and have headroom with the new server hardware and software--we should be good for a while.
There are a couple of things left that will be going on in the background (adding more storage, live backup imaging, etc.), but we should be able to move the server from the bench to it's new home/rack soon. That'll require some downtime and we'll notify everyone when that happens.
It's been really good to see Winners trickling back on. The email access link for anyone caught in the bot defences will remain active for a few months, but we'll eventually take that down. (Bots will find it and create another nightmare...)
Thanks again for everyone's patience!
by 
