Forum spammers

[Oscar]

Normally we get a slow but steady trickle of people joining the forum only to end up being spammers trying to sell stuff which is VERY unrelated to large format photography; I delete these posts and their accounts as soon as I can.

But last night it seems to have become an avalanche, and there's no way I can try to weed out the "real" registrations from the "spammer" ones that quickly.

So for now I'm not accepting new account registrations. Hopefully this is a very brief restriction until things return to normal.

[Walter Glover]

Thanks for watching over us Oscar.

[Oscar]

I hope to try a temporary fix later today, we'll see how that goes.

The fundamental issue is that the installation of this forum software has long been very broken which makes it very difficult to properly upgrade. When I get time (hah!) I intend to set up an all-new system in parallel and then migrate the forum to that. Which would then solve this spammer issue plus others. But pressures of work means that won't happen for some time yet.