Like others in this thread,
when I visited
http://tasvideos.org/
and saw the broken page, I got confused.
I understand the need to
protect the front page from lots of
traffic, but I have a few questions:
1) Why not put a comment explaining
that the main front page is currently
disabled and link to somewhere
explaining in more detail?
2) Why did you use an old snapshot
showing being from the end of 2014?
If you had a recent snapshot,
then at least people would see newer
movies.
3) Are pages cached? If the issue was
server load, and serving a static page
works, that suggests that you could
have just put caching in front of
the normal page and have been able
to continue serving.
4) Is there another page to see the
most recently accepted movies?
5) When are you going to restore
the main page to serving normally again?
Just generally, it would be helpful to
be more clear about what's going on,
instead of making it look like the
front page is broken.