X-Bomber the GameIntroduction »Welcome to the home of X-Bomber the Game: a vertical-scrolling spaceshooter for Windows, based on the Japanese sci-fi TV series: Star Fleet
It features lots of arcade action, weapons and explosions.
News » Since last weekend, we've had to put a large number of enormously wide IP blocks in place for the site and, more specifically, for the forum.
The attack began to tail off late last week but is still intermittently ongoing.
The attack has consisted of millions of attackers that I can see in AW Stats. They are targetting a large number of PHPBB installations, alongside Xenforo, as well as even forums that were written individually for their sites.
At the forum end, we can see that the attackers are trying to register bogus accounts, reset passwords and break into the user control panel etc. but none of that has worked for them here.
It's clear that the explanation that, for some reason, has been thrown around for these recent attacks: that this is companies scraping the forum to train AIs, is garbage.
Stunning the server with that many clients is so disproportionate and counterproductive to this stated objective that it can't seriously be held up as a way of disguising the true purpose.
About 80% of site admins reporting this issue that I've come across have switched over to using cloudflare to address the problem.
There are so many issues with using cloudflare when it comes to the integrity of user data that I'm actually staggered that as many site admins even seriously considered adopting it.
What I can say is that this site will *NEVER* use cloudflare or any similar 'service' where your client data is passed off to a 3rd party for them to decrypt, inspect and then, (if you're lucky) pass on to our server.
I would far rather see the site go under with 508 resource errors permanently than make that compromise.
If any legitimate user has trouble accessing the forum due to the huge range of IPs that I've blocked, please let me know and I'll just do a carve-out for you in htaccess to get you back in. 
I found this image of a card from the Star Fleet board game a good while back but it didn't get added to the site until now.
There are quite a few images of the board and counters in the Toys and Merchandise part of the site but this card features quite an interesting image of the Alliance fighters attacking an off-world installation that isn't seen in the series.
The illustration itself looks good, but the photo is fuzzy.
It would be interesting to track the game down and see what other cards are in it.  I see that Phil at SFFB has been very busy (I assume in Lego Designer), making Lego versions of the Star Fleet characters.
As it stands, we have Shiro, Hercules, Lee and Lamia.
Thanks to Dan Hitchin for letting me know about this interesting project I made a few changes to the site themes (apart from dusk) and altered some of the ratios and colours of the transparency to reduce the contrasts a bit and make it easier on the eye.
I improved the system so that you can choose whatever colour you want from the theme selector, rather than just having it default to blue or having the chameleon mode set the colour based on the time of year.
I would be interested to hear peoples' thoughts on how else the site's presentation can be improved.  I've seen images of this little playset before, in its packaging, but Dan from SFFB sent me some images of the individual items close up.
The white shuttle looks to be a spring-loaded launcher that 'fires' the little 4-wheeled trolley.
In turn, The X-Bomber and battlecruiser models can be fitted on top of that.  Dan from SFFB passed me this great photo of Mark Rolston (John Lee voice actor) with a representative from a recent convention, taken by CJ Jones.  The other week, I saw on Trekcore that Prodigy was apparently being removed from netflix due to licensing renewals (or lack of same).
The commenters were very positive about the show, so I downloaded the two series that were made.
A couple of episodes in: once the series set itself up, it got really good.
This show was clearly made by some very talented people who love the show.
This was the first Star Trek series in quite some time that I was really quite sad to see the end of. .jpg)
I saw that X user: kiijmesuga175 had designed some characters for an online game: When the World Ends, which seems like a cheery setting...
In any case, the artist had based Kanetsugu-kun's helmet on Shiro's in Star Fleet.  The other day, I spotted on nitter that there had been a 2012/2013 manga, called Devilman Grimoire, that was written by Go Nagai.
It has two characters: Agwel and Ghelmer, that are based, cosmetically, on Shiro and Makara.
These characters work for the main antagonist: Sirene, which is all I know about the series.
I put the images of the two characters here.
I was looking around on Deviantart for anything new related to Star Fleet (which I didn't find) and I clicked some banner by accident that took me into their AI image generator that apparently gives you 10 free spins of the carousel wheel per week.
I was quite happy with some of the results. I like the mode that it's chosen above.
It's neither creepily photorealistic nor insipidly cartoonish.
In any case, it finally gave me a good depiction of Dr McDonald, who is completely not-at-all based on any real person. She walked away from Simetra's medical-industrial complex and uses actual medicine to keep the Sylph squadron pilots in the utmost fighting condition.
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