Hello all! Unfortunately our server was the subject of a Denial of Service attack today, and is currently inaccessible to most of you.
If you are technically proficient enough to force an update of your system's DNS records, or you can manually assign 'www.nationstates.net' to 71.19.247.42, you can access us now. Otherwise you may need to wait for up to 24 hours before you can reach the server.
Update: We're back, for now at least! There is some ongoing screwiness with HTTPS on the forums; if you're having trouble with that, try switching to http://forum.nationstates.net instead.
Update 2: About Denial of Service attacks: What happens is somebody organizes a large number of systems to flood the server with data requests, which locks everybody else out. DoS attacks are a part of life when you're a slightly popular online game, and NS has received plenty of them over the years. They're illegal but it happens. Normally we don't announce them as such, since that would encourage a lot of speculation about who's behind it and why, and the reality is that no-one will ever know, including us. (Even if someone claims they're behind it.) There are things we can do to protect a server against DoS attacks, but we've never bothered too much because they only take us down for a short period of time, and don't happen very often.
