Reposted from the supporters forum:
Ok, lets looks at some stats:
Based on the graphs:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/forum-getting-too-popular/msg305039/#msg3050391500 news posts in a day, up from 500 or so usual. That's say 1000 posts due to the contest announcement.
The contest thread has 55 pages of 15 posts per page = 825 posts.
That leaves only an extra 175 regular posts due to the contest, or up by 35% on the regular daily value.
And if you divide that by 5 as worst case figure for newbies signing up for the contests, it's only 35 people, tops.
That would be a max figure due the stats being out of date by however many hours.
Not a huge increase really?
Given that quite few (majority perhaps?) would have been existing users with one or a few posts, it does not seem like the sky has fallen here, as much as it might seem to have for some.