R-bloggers.com just went through a (forced) maintenance – and is back online! (I hope)

Dear R users, R-bloggers is (hopefully) back online! I wanted to update you that in the past two days, the site has been subject to unreasonable amount of traffic (probably spambots of some sort, but it is not clear to me yet). During that time, the site went down for several hours throughout yesterday and until just an hour ago. After failing to resolve the problem through regular means, I have now had the server upgraded the site to have doubled the amount of resources, and for now it seems the site is stable again (but I am giving this another day or two to be sure). I apologies for the downtime. Also, during some of this time (while the site was down, but the .htaccess was still working), I redirected visitors to a new site I am working on (R-users.com, which I will write about with more detail later this month), where I had placed a pop-up banner to explain the situation. I understand that some of you did not see the pop-up explanation on the site (lengthy explanation on why that happened at the end**) and got (understandably!) upset, so please except my apology on that forced-redirect / without-a-clear-explanation! I love the R community, and intend to keep r-bloggers alive as much as I can. Yours truly, Tal Galili ** Transparency: Q: why didn’t the pop-up banner with the explanation show up on r-users.com today (although it did yesterday)? A: Yesterday I thought the problem with r-bloggers got resolved so I took down the banner. During today I realized the problem persisted and that I had to migrate to a stronger server. All of that was managed through my smartphone while I was away from the computer, so I was able to ask the people from the hosting company to redirect the site, but was not able to get the banner up during these 3 hours. Sorry!