Question Temporary Suspension of Registration

I came in today to find over 300 guests. This seemed a bit strange to me so I looked into the registration lists. I deleted over 1,000 recent registers (probably closer to 2,000) with variations of about 5 email addresses. I turned off the forum for about 5 minutes while I looked for a way to stop the spammers. They were appearing almost as quickly as I was deleting them. I turned off the registration and turned the forums back on. When I noticed that the guest list had dropped to over 200, I turned registration back on and watched the guest list grow again so it's off again.

So, here's the thing. If you're trying to register, please wait a day or so and try again. If you registered in the last three days of 2013 and found that you aren't registered, sorry about that. Please wait a day or so and try again.

Thanks for your patience.

Wow, spammers really suck. I guess I am lucky I made it through all the noise and was able to register!

Actually, you were better than lucky. You proved yourself to be !spammer with a nice, well written, introductory post! This was good since you were just about in the middle of the spammers. Lucky comes in that you didn't wait another day, or even a few hours, before registering

I'm going to try turning on registration again. The numbers seem much better now. If I need to turn it off again, I'll report here.

Things seem more normal now (except maybe for the 57.7k Views I'm seeing on this post). I guess that spammers have to have something to do to fill that downtime around Christmas and New Years, same as the rest of us . Guest count still seems a little high but not abnormally high so I'll just leave registration on for now.

If you've been waiting to register, this is probably a good time. If you want an even better chance of not being deleted by accident, post a question or comment which will show that you aren't a spammer, the way RussBrown did. There will be a lag of a day or so while the post gets authorized. Of course, this is just for people registering now. If you've been registered a while, chances are that you won't get deleted any time soon whether you post or not. This is not to say that we don't want to hear from you because we do!

However, if you've been registered and never posted, you'll probably see the same lag in your first post hitting the forums no matter when you post.

We're now at 57.8k views of this thread and 46 guests (and rising during the writing of this post) so registration is being turned off again. If you were waiting to register, sorry you missed your chance but hopefully another chance will pop up soon. We've had 67 registrations in the two days its been open but I don't see any indications that any of them are real.

If you registered in the last couple of days and got deleted, I'm sorry. Just wait a week or so and try again. Keep in mind that I'm not deleting every registration, only the ones that seem to not be interested in TBA.