Aww thanks for making this thread.
@Jeruba The problem has been difficult to troubleshoot. No code has been changed recently so it’s not as though a change has been made that broke things. It does seem that the crisis is related to the amount of traffic coming into the site; that is, more people are accessing the site than the server can handle. I know it doesn’t seem there are more people accessing the site, but there are bots belonging to search engines that “crawl” through websites periodically – that’s how they know about websites in order to have them appear in your search results – and we were being crawled by at least three at once – Google, Bing, and a Chinese search engine called Baidu. I blocked robots from accessing Fluther and this helped a lot. However, you’ll notice that things aren’t completely fixed yet, meaning there’s probably an additional source of traffic on the site besides the search engine bots, so someone could be running a DOS attack on us for some reason. Unfortunately there isn’t a lot you can do to make someone stop DOSing you. In that case kind of your only option is to make your servers “strong” enough to handle that amount of traffic, which is what we’ll be doing next. The next change we’re planning is to move Fluther over to a faster host.
As far as what is fixed: the site is moving at a reasonable pace now and I haven’t gotten an internal server error message while trying to access anything in days, whereas before I was getting them more than 50% of the time while trying to access questions and do normal browsing.
In the meantime, if there’s anything that’s still not working for you, try doing it from the i.fluther.com mobile site instead of the desktop site.