Update on Site Issues as of late

Hi everyone. The last few days have been filled with quite a few issues for the GKM website, but it seems like everything is finally stabilizing. We want to give you an explanation of everything that's happened over the last several days. Some of this you might have heard in our recent update posts, but we'll go over everything here for a complete review.

Site Updates

A few days ago, we went through the process necessary to update the Concrete5 core to the latest version that this site is on, and along with that update all of the add-ons we're using for the site. The primary purpose of always making sure we're up to date (aside from shiny new features being released, etc) is to make sure that any speed improvements or security improvements are always updated. We went through and updated everything, and it all seemed to be successful.

Malicious Bot Traffic

At the same time that we were doing these site updates (which in and of itself can slow down the site due to the amount of interaction with the database) we discovered that there was an excess amount of bots hitting the site. This was choking the server and causing it to load super slowly, or sometimes not load at all. After dealing with the malicious bot traffic, the site is secure, and it seems to have fixed the different errors people were experiencing on the site.

As a side note, we would like to thank everyone who sent in reports of errors on the site. There's only so much we can test on our end before performing a change to the GKM website, and there are some cases where there was either something that was missed (due to the massive size of the GKM site as a whole, and all the possibilities), or something that was a unique case that caused the problem that we couldn't test for. We also wanted to apologize to all of the Safari users out there who were unable to access the site during this time because of all that was going on.

Conclusion

As of today, the site seems to be back to normal loading speed, and usability across browsers seems to have returned to normal, although we may need Rogaine to help with all the pulled hair during this process, lol.

However, as always, if any of you are still experiencing any issues with the site, please make sure you clear your browser cache to ensure that it's not still displaying outdated data, and if the issue still persists, please send us a ticket at https://gkmsupport.freshdesk.com, and we'll help out however we can.

Thank you all for bearing with us during this process, we truly appreciate it.

Have a great day, and God Bless!
GKM Admin