Thanks to the entire GLRF community who have endured website outages and broken links in the GLRF Categories Videos.

First, a bot attack. On Wednesday, 03 August, we received an email from Mandrill, our email transactional provider, that our monthly allocation for sending emails thad almost been depleted. Since the GLRF Team was working on the Community Digest for 04 August, the notification was put aside. After the Outgames blog entry was finished at 1 am on Thursday, 04 August, we decided to have a look at our Mandrill account. All email allocations were gone and there were 254,000 emails in backlog. It turns out a bot was either used against the website or implanted, we'll still can't be sure. The bot was taking advantage of a vulnerability in an email form on the GLRF ecommerce platform. Needless to say, the Team was up all night, the issue resolved, and the 04 August digest went out without a glitch. Where was the bot source? China.

Next, on Sunday 07 August, the website kept displaying a server not available, 503 error. It seems that, and we're still not sure if the two are related, a follow on fix to plug the vulnerability, reactivated the bot. We had 273,000 visits to the ecommerce platform. Our server administrator said a "process" was consuming all of the server's RAM memory, and we have literally gigabytes. We disabled one application in All Oars, and not the ecommerce platform, and after that, the server resumed normal operation. Since then, we have reenabled the application and no problems have arisen. Bottom line: something hit the GLRF website and then just stopped and we are still clueless as to what or why.

Ongoing: on a daily basis, one or more hackers from Russia and who knows where else keeps trying to register on the GLRF website. Some succeed. We know the trademark signs and immediately delete the registrations. As this has been going on for more than a year, we continuously add more banned emails and ip addresses to our registration component. Sunday, 07 August, was a huge battle. There were 577 attempts to sign up, all from the banned ip addresses and email addresses. The seawall is in place and holding but the attacks are relentless.

Finally, on Thursday morning, 11 August, the GLRF Team was stunned to find that the GLRF Categories videos were no longer functional. It turns out that YouTube had deprecated the coding we were using and why they decided to suddenly turn off the switch at midnight 10 August, we will never know. Luckily, our web developer was able to fix the code by 09:00 so that the subscribers to the Community Digest would find useful pages when clicking on the videos. Some of our early digest clickers were faced with non-fucntional videos.

A further note about videos and what we think is homophobia: from time to time, a video that we add to the GLRF Categories videos suddenly is marked private. That means the account that originally uploaded the video has seen that GLRF has embedded the video and they mark it private to prevent GLRF members from seeing it. Is this homophobia? If it looks like homophobia, smells like homophobia, and acts like homophobia, it probably is. Our apologies to our members. Unfortunately, as much as we try to promote acceptance and inclusion, there are parts of the rowing community that remain ... homophobic.