Hello, Lance here...I was pointed here by someone on the Tribal Council Message Board. Thank you!
Yes, it's been an interesting 24 hours! Yesterday morning at about 10:00am I noticed some sluggishness to the site and the site stats did not look good. I had a user having problems resetting her password and when I tested this function it took about 5 minutes for the new password to arrive via e-mail (should have been nearly instantaneous). So I figured something was up and was going to submit a ticket to the webhost admins.
Well, at about 10:50am they called me! Said they were seeing a lot of e-mail activity and it was bogging down their server. They traced this back to my site since it was the only one doing any amount of mailing.
We tried for a few hours to isolate the problem and turned off most of the e-mail functions on my site and they rebooted the server, but the problem didn't go away. After exhausting all options, they had to bring down the site and rebuild the server. Unfortunately the message they put up in place was not very informative--sorry! The bill has definitely been paid and the site is not going away. I wish they would have said "temporarily unavailable!"
Anyway, they got the site up at about 10:00pm last night after being down since 3:00pm. Unfortunately the new server they built had a few things missing from it including the mechanism I use for auto-logon. For those that got the "mcrypt" error, this was what was going on. On my PC at home last night I was able to bypass this error, but I found out at work today that it's not always possible to do that, so I completely disabled this function. Sorry for those that had to delete your cookies. This should no longer be necessary.
Additionally, they have completely disabled ALL mail activity on the server, so for the time being there is no mail being sent from the server. This includes message board posts, reminder notices, as well as some of the mailings for password resets and such.
I will be working with the webhost providers on a plan that brings these functions back online, but understandably they will want to proceed cautiously to avoid a repeat of the fiasco of yesterday/this morning.
Thanks everyone for your patience, and please, just in case, get your votes in early and keep checking back on the "news" section of the site for important updates!
...Lance