This is the Archive of the Other News forum. This specific forum is used as a catch all for all the old news posts that have to be sorted to the appropriate archive forums as well as the Other News Archive.
Finally finding about some of the bots that are flooding the users online - bytespider apparently is a huge offender here - ignores robots.txt and comes in from a ton of different IPs
Ghan has said he has fixed this. Monovertex please confirm this fix. This was only a problem with people that had signatures in the upper levels like not the special members but the respected members.