You might have noticed that recently here have been several patches where the forums and front pages have been rather slow - or in the case of the front pages (e.g. medieval2.heavengames.com) not loading at all.

HG's tech people (mainly Zen I believe) identified several causes of these - the first patch of poor performance was a sustained attack on HG's servers, the second more recent one sounds like it was something going awry with a search engine polling the sites - and seem to have fixed things.

My apologies for not giving a more contemporaneous update (such as those over-keen chaps at AOM heaven no offence obviously); hopefully things will have a better patch of stable running.

If anyone feels like a bit of pantomime type action, a big 'huzzah' for the tech team for keeping things going and a big 'boo, hiss' for the muppets attacking the site would be quite welcome. Whether or not anyone is behind anyone else might be irrelevant though (other than timezones I guess). I digress slightly.