Beware of FantasyAuctioneer.com

[Kingstowne Dealers 14]

I don't know whats happening over there but lately the site has not be performing up to standards. I've set up about a dozen Mock Auction Drafts over the past week and they've all ended early due to technical difficulties with the site, e.g. not being able to access the site at peak times, slow Auction interface, random freezing. I've tried this with several different machines with different connections and get the same results. I used them last year with no problems, this year it's a mess! If your thinking about Auction draft you may want to look at alternatives until the site gets it's act together. With the date of my real Draft approaching I may have to move it ESPN. You've been warned.

[Kingstowne Dealers 14]

Update:

 

Very Important Announcement:

 

 

As many of you know, we have been having severe technical difficulties over the last seven days. We have recently concluded that FantasyAuctioneer has been under a Denial of Service Attack (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_service). What does this mean? Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia article:

 

 

“[it] generally consists of the concerted, malevolent efforts of a person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently...One common method of attack involves saturating the target (victim) machine with external communications requests, such that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable.”

 

In the past, we have suffered interruptions in service due to inaccurate load tests leading us to allow too many concurrent auctions. This year, we set the number of concurrent auctions to a level well below what we have handled in the past (i.e., instead of relying on load tests, we used historical capacity). Despite a relatively low number of concurrent auctions, the amount of web traffic our front servers registered each day of the last week has been off the charts. Nonsensical server requests were registered coming from thousands of different IP addresses (e.g., loading and reloading the FAQ pages over and over and over again) at a pace that far surpassed any reasonable expectations based on the number of auctions we allowed.

 

Who could be doing this? Your guess is as good as ours. It might be a new or emerging competitor with a copycat software or perhaps one of the people who have / will be offering to buy our company at pennies for a dollar. Or it could be a bored 13-year old hacker, who knows. The only things we can say are the following:

 

1. We are very sorry for these problems. Believe me, you have no idea.

 

2. We will refund your fee(s). Please be patient with us as we have a mountain of refunds to process. We promise that you will get your money back.

 

3. At the moment, we are still trying to figure out a way to prevent these attacks. Until we come up with a satisfactory solution, please use our website at your own risk. There is only so much we can do in terms of customer service should we get hit again. You may use the promo codes "DOS1", "DOS2", "DOS3", "DOS4", and so on to set up a free private auction should you so choose.

 

Please look for more updates here on the homepage of the website. Thank you.

 

-The FantasyAuctioneer Team

[Belushi 9]

Great. I've got two auctions on that site this week.

[ephford 0]

Great. I've got two auctions on that site this week.

 

 

It worked fine for our teams last night. The only hiccups were java & flash issues resolved by changing laptops. I would strongly suggest you do a mock beforehand.

[snowdogg187 0]

It worked fine for our teams last night. The only hiccups were java & flash issues resolved by changing laptops. I would strongly suggest you do a mock beforehand.

 

 

The site is horribly slow, it just took me a minute to log in.

[mobb_deep 917]

LOL at the site being DDoS attacked. Welcome to internet security, circa 1995 FantasyAuctioneer. I love how they just cut and pasted a blurb off Wiki too. They probably don't even know wtfack a DDoS attack is. The tech support dudes at the host probably told them that, because they don't have the bandwidth. Either that or one of those same geeks was surfing porn and download a trojan or malware. I hope you guys don't have credit card info on file with them. If they're not even packet filtering, I doubt they have state of the art encryption or security.

[Pimptaddy 0]

LOL at the site being DDoS attacked. Welcome to internet security, circa 1995 FantasyAuctioneer. I love how they just cut and pasted a blurb off Wiki too. They probably don't even know wtfack a DDoS attack is. The tech support dudes at the host probably told them that, because they don't have the bandwidth. Either that or one of those same geeks was surfing porn and download a trojan or malware. I hope you guys don't have credit card info on file with them. If they're not even packet filtering, I doubt they have state of the art encryption or security.

 

 

It sounds like there is a party going on over there. Sorry I missed the fun.

[Kingstowne Dealers 14]

The site is totally down now

 

I'm focked.

[olsener 0]

Anyone know of any alternative auction websites to use for the draft, besides fantasyauctioneer? This kind of sprung up on us and we draft tomorrow. Fantasy Auctioneer is the only auction website i've heard of.