The active Forum boards have been moved to Groups.io to improve stability, reliability and accessibility.
Please select a link below to go to the relevant group
The last 120 days of posts from the old forum have been copied to the new groups. Apologies that they don’t appear as individual posts – surprisingly there is no software to export posts from the old forum, and so we had to write our own python code to copy thread by thread!
The old forum can be found here, though as noted below it continues to be under attack and might be offline. We’ve also disabled all the inactive boards to prevent accidental posting. Legacy, unused boards will be archived in readonly form and will be available to search via this page.
Why are we Doing This?
Since the start of 2025 the Forum has been under constant attack by botnets with, at times, up to a million compromised computers attempting to connect at the same time from all over the world. This overwhelms the database, both filling it with bogus connection logs, and consuming all available connections. This results in users being locked out, or experiencing extreme slowness.
Why is this Happening?
This sort of attack is typically carried out by spammers or scammers hoping to overwhelm the system and break in by sheer force of numbers. Once they’ve gained access, they will generally install malware, steal any personal or confidential information, and then either blackmail the owners or sell it on the dark web.
The SPA don’t store any personal or confidential information in the forum, however the attackers won’t know that until their attack suceeds – and so they persist.
The current Forum software is not capable of defending against this sort of attack due to its design. Every time a user tries to read a post, the software creates a database connection for them. This applies whether the user is logged in or anonymous, and that’s a problem.
The system has a hardcoded limit on the number of connections. The forum only has 330 registered users, of which about forty are active, so under normal conditions there’s plenty of capacity. However, each bot counts as an anonymous user and so when more than about a thousand users attempt to connect at once, the system runs out of connections. Furthermore, each connection is logged for audit purposes, and so the database gets larger and larger, till the entire filesystem of the database server is filled up. Recently the audit table had a billion records.
What are the SPA Doing About it?
We’re moving the forum to Groups.io. This is a specialist platform hosting discussion forums and is widely used across the astronomy community. For example the BAA’s Spectroscopy, Radio Astronomy, Variable Star and Asteroid discussion groups are hosted on Groups.io, as are the UK Meteor Network and Global Meteor Network‘s groups, and those of many popular software products such as Deep Sky Stacker, EQMOD, Autostakkert, SkyMap, Cartes du Ciel/Skychart, RSpec and ASCOM. Groups.io are equipped to handle the sorts of issues we’ve faced much better than the SPA!
Could we have fixed the existing forum? Perhaps, but not without considerable cost and effort. We would have had to bring in specialists. At typical IT consultancy rates, the cost would likely have run to several thousand pounds. On the other hand, groups.io is free for up to 200 registered users, and $220 thereafter for up to 500.