Regarding Spam, Making Accounts and Profile Changes

[Servotron]

Hello everyone, just a little PSA about some of the stuff that has been going on behind the scenes forum-wise.

If you were a part of the forum earlier in the year, you may have noticed that we were starting to attract a lot of spam threads even with some of the anti-spam measures we had when people signed up for an account. To combat this we changed to a moderator system where one of the mods (normally myself) has to activate your account before you are able to post, which has basically wiped out spam threads. All the mods get emails when we get new sign-ups, so hopefully no-one has had to wait too long for there account to be activated.

Unfortunately this has had a slightly adverse effect, but it hasn't affected more than a few people at the moment. If you change profile information, then there is a chance that your account will be locked until a mod gets to it and re-activates it. I'm not sure what it is that causes the account to be locked, it could be a change of email address rather than something like a signature.

This isn't something that is going to be fixed soon, it appears that this is a known problem with the style of forum software we use. Having this changed would apparently cause some kind of security flaw, so it isn't a priority for phpbb to fix.

So, BE AWARE THAT CHANGING PROFILE INFORMATION MIGHT CAUSE YOUR ACCOUNT TO BE LOCKED UNTIL A MOD CAN REACTIVATE IT.

If you feel that you need to change some information, maybe do it before you go to bed. You might not have to wait then!