As some of you may have noticed, we’ve had to escalate website security to maximum settings over the past weekend due to a significant issue.
The website has been targeted by what amounts to a denial of service (DoS) attack—a disruption designed to overload the server and render the site unusable. This activity caused repeated server crashes and necessitated increasingly restrictive measures to mitigate automated (non-human) traffic.
Cause:
Our investigation has identified the Events Calendar plugin as the source of the problem. Automated bots are aggressively crawling the calendar’s search functions, overwhelming system resources and causing slowdowns and crashes.
Temporary Measures:
To address this, the Events Calendar has been temporarily deactivated overnight to conduct further testing. This step comes with some limitations:
- The calendar may be intermittently unavailable.
- Areas will not be able to add or edit events during this time.
While this is not ideal, it’s a necessary short-term measure to maintain overall website operation without relying on the highest-level security settings, which can also hinder normal user interaction.
Next Steps:
We are actively working on a resolution and will update you as soon as we have a path forward.
However the new website—launching soon—uses a different system for events management, which will address this issue entirely. More updates on the new site will follow shortly.
Thank you for your understanding and patience as we navigate this issue.