Rip and Tear

Crevel is moreso right it's not some bonkers stance on the Ukraine war or anything (much to the dismay of one particularly vocal former staff member) it's moreso that a large reason why our forums maybe 6-8mo ago were so terrible was because like 1/3rd to 1/2 of our forum traffic was just russian/chinese IP bots that scraped the forums 24h a day, if this has been for two years I don't know what to tell you but we really only did this ban in the last year or so because it was massively slowing down the performance of our actual hardware for the forums since we arent on like AWS or something where we can shift memory (instead of having an entire machine dedicated to it, which we have as far as i know).

I reccommend a VPN, https://1.1.1.1/ (technically a DNS resolver, not a VPN, your mileage may vary) is one that's free and utilized by Cloudflare itself which is the same protection service on the website. 

For real the issue was the attack of russian spambots. It was the admins choice to block off the russian IPs

However, Kowaman reached me out and added my IP to the whitelist. I feel priveleged now. Kowaman is a bae.

@Widu @Arbyzovitch 

Y'all should reach admins too, send them your IP to stop the western tyranny 

I do wonder who that staff member was? :0

But that's actually really chill of the mods and squawkhawk. Thanks guys!