"An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs"
Almost a year ago, specifically on July 28th, we finally fully identified and then immediately banished people who had committed crimes in our IRC network (since 2022). We then reported them to the police. As recently as weeks ago we opened another police case against them. We supplied evidence to the cops, who were invited to our home to collect it. We won't tolerate criminal activities. Those trolls aren't coming back anymore (they try other approaches); those cowards now realise that there are consequences for their actions. There's lots more coming their way, they've clearly underestimated us.
The site has since then changed. It improved. It actually did faster than originally planned what had been in the making for years already. The Wiki was converted to static pages (that solved the issue of bots constantly hammering away at databases), WordPress 3.9.x (which ran out of support only months earlier) was finally abandoned (all the material got converted to static pages), and workflows were improved where possible. Some things got automated. This was well overdue and much needed - a well-recognised solution to technical debt.
In a sense, the attacks on us resulted in the site becoming a lot more productive, not just robust. Today, or overnight, we're optimising things some more for speed gains. The site is about 10 times faster than it used to be and downtimes are rare (they're typically due to network maintenance like router reboots).
The lesson of this story is, if you do evil things, bad things will come your way. So don't do evil things. █