Recent Bans - Corrected

[z929669]

We apologize to those of you that were recently banned from this website via IP address ban. This website was recently a victim of a DDoS attack or similar bot attack, which rendered the site useless, due to bandwidth leeching from the massive influx of concurrent 'users'. We implemented a first-measure approach to auto-ban IPs exhibiting bot behavior, but it evidently also captured a relatively small number of legitimate users.

The good news is that all the original bans are automatically lifted after a period of time, which has been greatly reduced now. We've also relaxed the criteria for tagging 'bad' behavior and acting on it. The other good news is that not a single bad actor gained access to our backend or data (other than what is intended for public access), because the Step server is extremely secure (i.e., 'hardened'). Nevertheless, even a hardened server is not immune to bot-traffic-related attacks without some sort of auto-banning mechanism in place.

Please be patient with us as we fine tune and optimize the auto-ban algorithms, as we've never needed to use such a measure in the past 13 years we've been providing our free, ad-free services to the modding community.

If you have a related issue in the future, you can reach us via DM on the Nexus > StepModifications (or z929669) user account.

Our apologies for the inconvenience if you have been impacted by this.