Why do I get gateway timeout errors when I try to ask a question?

[DaveMenc]

3 times in the last two days, I've tried to ask questions on this site and gotten "gateway timeout error." My guess is that it's some kind of connectivity problem from work; I'm typing this from home so if this works, there's some network problem at work. So you can ignore it. 

On the other hand, if this fails, it's a real problem on Atlassian answers but, of course, no on will see it...

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The site is being constantly attacked by bots, and over the last couple of weeks, this has ramped up from "nuisance" to "so bad it's effectively a DDOS attack".  The software is not really built for this (I'm hoping Confluence 6 is a bit more resilient), and while Atlassian are trying to do something about it, it's not a top priority.

Amongst other reasons, Answers is going away soon, to be replaced by another community site.  (Again, I'm hoping that has proper spam protections, such as rejecting questions that don't meet broad natural grammar rules)

Recently, they've added something that lets spam email arrive, but appears to bin off the pages, so at least the spam is a total waste of time for the spammers, but it feels like the protection is so intensive, it's not able to give the community the processor time to write before timing out.  It's like it's simply too busy binning spam to respond to us.

[G__Sylvie_Davies__bit-booster_com_]

It was definitely very bad yesterday!   I was trying to answer a question and kept getting the same.   Seems much better today.