I know it's easy enough to clean up but it's not something I should have to do. I don't expect much for $20/mo but I do expect them to give me an IP that isn't trashed.
Solid advice on EIG. Stay far away from their brands. If you're able to admin your own server, Linode is definitely my pick. I have a couple of VMs there. I used to use Digital Ocean but their IP ranges are trashed. I had to send email from an external SMTP server since the IP they gave me was...
A firewall isn't generally useful in combating a DDoS. If your origin address is hidden, cloudflare should be able to stop a DDoS. I'm not sure why you're seeing threads not being marked as viewed unless there's some other kind of cache enabled somewhere. Are you caching resources locally somehow?
It's not working. You've always been able to change the color but changing the background pattern for the header and footer doesn't work. It's always the vertical stripes no matter what pattern is selected.
The ad styler isn't working properly. Changing the header/footer background images doesn't seem to have any effect. This has been a problem for a few versions now. I'm surprised it's still not fixed. Your own demo displays the same behavior.