As there have been no real contributions in years yet many gigabytes have been served (millions of vistiors) the cost in both money and time have exceeded capacity and the site has shut down. Never once was there an ad or subscription fee levied. It never cost a single visitor a single penny. I could not see changing this policy. Ads are nothing more than legal spam and subscription fees are extortion. Although if something is on the net it is seemingly free, someone is paying something somewhere.

A plea went out a month ago when I realized I had become overwhelmed with the amount of work I was having to put in just to stay afloat and combating the opponents I was up against. One forum  member offered but their expertise in RegEX but was for Javascript, not in Apache's version of RegEx, ModReWrite and .htaccess which are entirely different creatures.

It is too much for one person to manage considering every kiddie with a computer thinks they're the next Kevin Mitnick (hacker) or cloud services running thousands of AI data scrapers hammerning the site. And then there are the spammers. I simply can't afford to spend as much as 7 or 8 hours a day or often more monitoring traffic and circumventing new hack attempts. I can't afford managed hosting. Shared hosting support will not help. There are simply too many inconsiderate a-holes on the net.

An era is over. And before you judge me try walking a mile in my moccasins. I did it for free for 25 years. I think I did my share. How many thousands of dollars and thousands of hours. I lost count. This used to be an active community of many but any more is just a resource to be exploited. And to those concerned, hack and scrape someone else.

These scraper bots couldn't care less about your bandwidth or whether their activity is affecting your site or your ability to maintain the site. Nether does shared hosting. They WANT your bandwidth to go through the roof and the bots to annoy you enoughto to upgrade to a much more expensive VPS, dedicated or managed hosting plan. They LOVE these bots and do NOTHING to stop them.

This is exactly what happened here. Why the site is gone. Even though I was able to block most new ones cropped up overnight so it was a daily chore to scour the access logs, detect the new assholes and block them. There were times I spent as much as 10 hours a day trying to circumvent them. To compound the issue even though the ones I had blocked were rejected it still created an entry in the access logs for EVERY ATTEMPTED CONNECTION FROM EVERY BLOCKED BOT. There were days I woke up and there were literally tens of thousands of these rejected connections in the access logs. It was impossible to weed through all the noise to catch and block new assholes. The logs were literally FLOODED to the point of uselessness!

This is the list of CIDRs I've identified as being abusive or malicious should you own and maintain a site under attack from these inconsiderate p*****.