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Starting to write this announcement, my mind is blank. There are literally no words to describe the feeling of relief to finally bring my project back to the world for it to serve its purpose once again.

What a crazy few months it has been. We never realized the true scale that this platform has grew to until now. The longest period of downtime in the history of Dread and it was essentially self-imposed. I want to start off by thanking every single one of you for your patience (or lack of in some instances) and support. I promise you, I read through every single comment wishing us well on Reddit and I only spent time replying to FUD simply because that was the minority where I could put a small amount of time into setting the record straight in response to them, I wasn't being ignorant. We are truly blessed to be a big part of the community and hope we can continue with our efforts to provide everything you sorely missed here. Really do appreciate you guys.

I have lots of appreciation towards Market Admins for their unwaivering and also anyone who was able to spare a donation during our downtime. As mentioned elsewhere, we ran ourselves into the ground as usual, burning through all our funds fighting the attacks before the shutdown, which usually is fine, we'll beat the attack and recoup afterwards. Obviously this time was different and with no funds to go off it has been a tough few months getting everything set up that we needed. Finally, a special thanks to "The Mc" for supporting and believing in me.

We missed Dread's 5th Birthday on February 15th, YES 5 YEARS, I can't believe I have been doing this for half a decade of my life now and honestly, having to work so hard again the last few months has been a huge motivator to push me in working through everything else that I have had planned for a long time. I suffered burn out over the last few years amongst the DoS attacks and personal issues and it put me in a place where I wasn't very active and Dread's management suffered from the loss of my insight and informed decision making. That is something of the past and we will only grow from here.

Any significant downtime of Dread and the balance we built is lost, everything becomes like the wild-west and lots of services take the opportunity to exit scam during this time where news travels slow through other obscure services.

Here's some of the main events for those out of the loop:

Kilos exit scammed
DeSnake/AlphaBay died or exit scammed (We'll discuss this over on /d/AlphaBay)
Ridiculous FUD about me, Paris, DeSnake spread like wildfire

I won't go into any of it as I have discussed a lot of this over on Reddit already and honestly, I don't care about any of this enough to continue talking about it right now after the extreme workload me and the staff have had to get through, while trying to somewhat guide the fallout still without the aid of Dread. Its all exhausting.

Something I will talk about is why Dread went down and why it took so long for us to return at full speed.

After some tough months dealing with the DoS attacks late last year, where we did struggle to gain much uptime and were mostly pinned to the use of private Tor links and the I2P gateway, I had begun working on a concept that would assist us and other's in providing availability for organic traffic (see my other announcement post). When we saw just how much damage the attacks were causing to the network and our servers were just getting trashed if we enabled any of the known onions for Dread or Recon, we decided to make a mostly rash decision, but the plan was to take down the cluster, burn it, gone. Then really spend some time, while being able to completely focus and not worry about management or monitoring the security of the entire cluster, in rebuilding with a new, more resiliant infrastructure, that implements everything we missed from the original cluster design. This was to allow more flexibility in scaling and provide more stability wherever possible. The initial talks between me and Paris resulted in a positive outlook, expecting a month give or take, until we could resume service. Boy, were we wrong! Not only did we completely under estimate what this would take, the theory of the plans really didn't align with what was capable with our existing setups of the codebase and how our ridiculously large and messy database was going to run.

We added more time to our potential timeline and as we went, Paris was running into more and more problems with the dependencies of this new cluster design. Serious props to him for sticking through it, I know this has especially been tough on him, things really didn't work out and our task lists just kept growing. During this time I worked on Daunt, getting everything configured and running smoothly and gradually getting market's running with their API to publish mirrors on there. This was a long process, between bugs in the imports and availability for me to speak with the admins, different schedules and so on, especially when I was sleeping during the day after passing out from working days at a time without sleep. This delayed things significantly and then I moved onto rewriting the main functionality of the Dread codebase. Something I have needed to do for about 5 years... not joking. It is no easy task and that is understating it. The rushed code and the complexity of the database layer and how everything interacts means that separating anything out to make it more efficient, breaks the entire platform. Everything is way too interconnected. Again, I took this on to improve things, bring down our overheads and hopefully put some ease on the servers, yet way under estimated things with the theory and expected to be able to complete this in little over a week. In this time, I realized this was an impossible job and I was left with a complete mess where even the frontpage wasn't able to load up, it was a no go. I decided it would be best to backtrack and work with the original code, integrating some of the new features I had developed and that I would continue on this in the near future, to give it the time and dedication it needs to do it right. The last few weeks have been a lot brighter and we've both been working through our task lists, getting more market admins on board with Daunt and improving the setup we have for the cluster. Not to mention, me and Paris have both had bouts of serious illness during this time, so that has been another factor.

1 week ago, we got Dread live for private testing. Most things ran smooth with minor bugs here and there, thank you to absolutely everyone who participated in that testing, you've been of such great importance in getting us to the finish line. The bug list kept me very busy and actually allowed me to identify issues in the system that have been present for a very long time and caused us trouble in the past, especially with Recon integrations and we could never understand the exact cause.

As of today, I finally got through to the end of my task list, which also grew many times during the day, but I got there, I'm done. Paris is done with his workload too.

Shaky and Solar have completed everything we have had to ask of them, especially the dreaded data entry tasks we set upon them, sorry guys, we love and appreciate you both and you deserve a lot of praise. Shaky also stuck his neck out in handling a lot of the FUD on Reddit and became subject to some of the abuse too.

To quickly touch on what is new, aside from the entire new platform launch... just some minor features I was able to port over from my rewrite work such as the Context Ads on the homepage, monthly filtering for the Donation Leaderboards, bug fixes and quality of life improvements in various places.

Recon will not be returning just yet, it is undergoing its own separate rewrite still which went on the backburner over the last few months. We'll probably discuss this in an announcement post in /d/Recon some time in the next week or so.

Anyway, this announcement is a complete babbling mess, I want a beer and sleep.

Welcome back everyone, we truly missed you.
Stay safe and enjoy access to your favorite services again ;)
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