I feel like I'd be able to write this kind of general detection code if I had a year to dedicate to it, and I'm not a giant corporation. So that's a disappointment.
Why don't you work on that after you're done with he new forum? I've always though cloudflare was crap. If something better can be made then I'm sure you could make a business out of it, or at the very least the forum would benefit.
Why would someone DDos these forums? What could they possibly gain from doing this?
Glad to see everything working now, because I wasn't able to use the forums the past 3 hours.
Because they're dicks. Some people just get off on it and do it because they can. Sometimes people also do it in an extortion attempt: "pay up or we won't stop".