Designed as a free-speech alternative to Leftist crowdmind Reddit, Voat.co uses a similar links list and voting system to Reddit but has more restrictions on abuse. Currently, the site is under coordinated DDOS and other attacks, presumably by Leftists who want to “no platform” (preemptively censor) it:

Edit 2:

This attack is relentless and dynamic. They have found holes in our system and hit us where we never expected. This has forced us to reconfigure our network and site behavior to prevent repeat attacks.

Voat has been put into “lockdown” mode so things like thumbnail generation are disabled.

Edit:

These guys are actually fairly creative. We might have a worthy opponent here. Buckle up Voat.

One of the reasons yesterday’s attempt at rolling forward the port code failed was that Voat was being sent DDOS style requests in very large numbers. See yesterdays announcement about this topic:

And itâ€™s buried somewhere underneath hundreds of cryptic error messages and seemingly impossible outcomes. I will have to provide details later but the summary is: Today when we attempted to roll out the port code base, everything and anything that could have possibly gone wrong did. I can only laugh looking back at today, it was that bad. We were forced to do a full rollback and currently Voat is running its legacy code base with some patchwork to deal with irreversible database changes. Voat had to do a full retreat. We will regroup and come back to fight another day. I’m sorry everyone, this was all my fault. I should have had a rollback version of the current software ready and I didn’t, I had to write it on the fly. I deserve the shame associated with this lack of foresight.

Voat is at a stage now that the code can somewhat deal with this without capitulating. Usually these attacks only last 10-12 hours, but this current run has been longer in duration than normal so we are now informing the community that we are actually being maliciously targeted.

Below are some interesting graphs showing some stat data:

I’ll provide more info when we have it, but PG.

Until then, enjoy having your bits closely inspected. Please don’t be shy about it either, just go with it. This includes the ladies as well… ;)