OK, so we're going through a mini reorganization of the forums to hopefully make it easier to navigate. I changed a lot of things, so I might have messed up somewhere, so please let me know if you see something weird, or something is not working correctly. It is still not complete, but hopefully everything will be finished within a couple days.

We get 100s of new registrations a week, and about 98% of them are spam bots. It is very tedious having to go through and manually delete/ban them all. It really slows down the approval process of new "real" members. Cayote and I can no longer keep up with this, so I think I found a solution where we don't have to manually approve new members.

The member group, which contains 600 of our forum members, is the default group which new members are assigned to when they register. I've changed the permission settings so that this group can no longer create topics, only reply to existing topics. Since most spam bots create a new topic, this will prevent them from posting their spam. Members of this group will be promoted to the regular members group after 2 posts. So, if you find you can't create new topics, just make a couple replies and everything will be back to normal for you.

We're going to test this out today, so we'll see how it goes! Hopefully no spam...

If you do see spam posts, please alert a mod right away.

Thanks everyone, just giving you an update just in case you were wondering why things look a little different around here.

:)

Spam ahead!