Important Forum News

21 January 2012, 18:02

The recent increase in activity of spammers and spambots targeting the Forum means that we have to make some big changes.

NB These changes will have no effect on activated members with a post-count greater than zero.

Guests will have limited access to just a few parts of the Forum. We hope this will encourage them to become activated members!

Members who have registered but have not had their membership activated will have the same status as Guests - they will have limited access and will be unable to post, view full-size images, or follow links.

Activation of membership will be by discretion of the Forum Administrator. New members will be asked to initiate an email conversation with him, and will be activated only when he is satisfied that the member is genuine and does not pose a threat to the Forum. We hope this process won’t be as intimidating as it might sound!

Just to make it clear, we are disabling activation by email with a clickable link.

18 January 2012, 15:40

The problem described below is now fixed with a shiny brand-new database.

The only problem is that the 17th of January 2012 has “disappeared” - anything you did on the forum that day has been lost. If you can, please do it again!

17 January 2012, 23:58

The Forum is temporarily closed because admin just did something stupid and caused some damage to the database...

It’ll be fixed as soon as possible.

Update:

We have started the process of restoring the database from yesterday’s back-up. Because our hosting company’s servers wait for a low-use period before running this process, it may take a little while. And I need a few hours sleep. With luck it’ll be done when I wake up and everything will work perfectly. Or maybe not...

With luck, all we will have lost will be a day’s activity on 17 January 2012. If you posted anything, signed up, or activated your membership on that day the records of it will probably have been lost. Sorry about that. Could you please do it again?

Another Update:

Of course nothing is ever quite as simple as you might like it to be. The hosting company’s tech support people are involved now, and we’re setting up a new database and loading all the old data into that. Then we’ll have to persuade the Forum to look in the right place, because the old database won’t work right.

We’ll get there in the end. Or somewhere, at least.