This morning I happened to scroll to the bottom of the homepage and noticed, to my shock, this:
I ran to Google Analytics to see what the heck got hit over the weekend. I wasn't closely monitoring things that day as I was traveling at the time.
According to GA, though, there was nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, it didn't register a massive spike in traffic at all, which is the first time I've ever seen that dramatic of a divergence in data between the forum software log and GA. A year or so ago an article got picked up by Hacker News and a few other places and we really did have over 250 people on the site simultaneously for a while there (adding up to a few thousand before then end of the day). But this is a mystery.
Only thing I can think of is we may have been hit by a DOS attack. Does anyone recall if there was any "funny business" with the site on Saturday that they specifically recall? I'll try to poke through more of the server logs later and see if I find anything.
Very weird. Maybe some angry old Atari dudes? Let bygones be bygones, guys!