Server update: it's all good (Patreon)

tl;dr: Everything is and was fine, the world of spam is wild, and sometimes help desks really drop the ball.

Quick update for everyone:  

First, thanks to everyone that reached out with ideas. Had a lot of great suggestions and it was reassuring to hear that this sort of spam issue is really hard to troubleshoot.  

So what happened? At this point I'm about 90% sure it was something like this. Someone was sending out spam emails that included, among a lot of other things, a link to a Backloggery forum signature. There's generally two reasons that might happen:  

1) The linked website has been hacked (we weren't, to be clear) and they're using it for some sinister purpose.  

2) They're just including links to legit sites to make the rest of the spam message seem more legitimate.  

Hosts often take the first possibility very seriously, so I was told "there's a good chance your server has been hacked, please look into this and fix it or we're shutting you down."  (A bit of an extreme assumption to make from some random spam IMO, but I wasn't clear on their reasoning at the time.)

One panic attack and server inspection later, it turned out everything is fine, the server hasn't been hacked, and I tell customer service as much.  So why were we shutdown? The help desk person never passed the "all clear" message along. 🤦‍♂️

This whole process was all the more difficult to figure out because for the past month or so, bots we're hitting our registration page and contact form, signing random emails up for accounts, and often causing those to flag our activation emails as spam. and getting us put on spammer lists. So it was tough in the thick of things to realize these were two separate spam-related problems when I'm getting "Your server has been blacklisted for spam!!!" and "Your server may have malware!!!" alerts at the same time.

So yeah, much ado about mostly nothing at the end of the day. But at least we got some security improvements out of it. And maybe this will help someone else out there dealing with spam weirdness.

Thanks so much again to everyone for their support. I was absolutely stunned to see people becoming patrons for the first time or increasing their pledges in the middle of the server downtime. You all continue to amaze me. 🍻 Hopefully this puts an end to this mess and we can get back to fun remake stuff going forward.