Correct. It is the midterm election and a huge paid leftist organization called Share Blue.

Share Blue has not yet struck voat in force yet, but the manipulation attack coming.

Hours ago, drudge report from my region of the world at 10:30 AM would not come up.

Hours ago, notabug.io was also attacked by garbage info bots by Share Blue attacked, in a dry run.

I've talked about the upcoming attack before but immediately get slammed -9 by sympathetic agents to Share Blue.

Proof of immediate -9s :

https://voat.co/v/news/2802497/14577296

But there is a solution to prevent damage for this midterm only, other than sluggish load issues from Share Blue semi attack.

I WARNED VOAT about ShareBlue about 100 times using various personas! I tried lots of times, that what you saw this hour is voats fate as midterm election approaches

I am not surprised at all about notabug.io. I have no doubt it is a test of what ShareBlue will do to voat.co

ShareBlue will probably resort to upvoating blatantly fake news (happened a couple times here), downvoating good election info, downvoating the most informative posters, and causing higher educated people to flee. But mainly a legal type of grey area DDOS of horrid "signal to noise" as you pointed out happening now this hour to notabug.io.

Legal Liabilities ; SahreBlue has too many untrusted people (though most hired on foreign soil ironically) to undetectably do ACTUAL DDOS or "Fuzzing" of web protocols to crash. ShareBlue will only do quasi-legal destruction.

There are of course algorithms to set to adjust for it in a real ShareBlue crisis:

Any voat account created from May 2018 to Now created 2AM EST to 9 AM EST, lacking much participation in the 3 Q subverses, and lacking much MDE activity, with net CCP of less than X per day over X days, is greylisted, their votes on ANYTHING put on a 2 hour delay but with interface letting them know, and all their posts the last 4 days retroactively collapsed and or moved to bottom of any thread display. Other algorithms based on refinement mainly will protect the sanctity of these four critical subverses :

v/News v/Politics v/TheDonald v/announcements

All subverses are important, but those four would result in this message for people posting who dont seem older than May 2018 , and not active legit Q or MDE :

"Sorry Voat is still possibly under ShareBlue attack at Threat Level 3, so this specific account created after May 2018 at this time cannot submit to v/News, try another subverse. Sorry"

Likewise for all voting on stories posted less than 3 days old in those key subverses.

Voting attempts could say:

"Sorry Voat is still possibly under ShareBlue attack at Threat Level 3, so this specific account created after May 2018 at this time cannot vote within v/News in realtime, and your vote is pending for another 30 hours. . Sorry"

Furthermore "speed brakes" are added for logins, posts, and votes during an attack , X logins per IP address per three hours, X posts per hour without a "CAPTCHA" per every new 3 postings, X votes up or down per hour without a "CAPTCHA" per every new 3 comment votes, and ESPECIALLY topic posts.

Those 40 lines of coding would fully protect voat during the SahreBlue Attack.

I have no doubt @PuttItOut has similar strategies in mind to enact when under an onslaught. The problem is that it needs to be not delayed of members might flee if too many days until engaged.

Its called "The Boiling Frog" metaphor. participants in the boiling water wait too long before seeing the damage done. The reaction needs to be 100% ready and tested NOW.

This solution only works for midterm attack by ShareBlue

long term solution requires something called a "web of trust" similar to the papers written in the 1980s and actually codified in earliest PGP trust rings. Basically a certain percent of people "vouch" for a new member using their credentials, to bestow limited rights. The most effective method is of course money offering, but ShareBlue is a funded agitProp organization.