Site is stabilizing.... slowly

We almost have things under control. We were hit by a couple of malicious bots that slowed the site to a crawl, which started a chain reaction of certain process breaking.

One of the processes that got screwed up is the tabulation of helpful votes on the recent comments page. Folks trying to visit the recent comments page while logged in have been reporting long load times.

In an effort to speed things up while we figure out the root cause of the issue, I've limited the most recent comments page to the most recent 100 - I'm now able to pull up the page while logged in (but it's taking 10-15 seconds).

And in the category of "when it rains, it pours," the search engine is currently not returning any results.

We will spend the day tomorrow trying to work through these remaining issues.