When you log in, you may notice that there is a 'who is online' section at the bottom of the page. It is possible for Admins to view the IP addresses of guests and to check their status. This morning there were (at the point that I checked) an amazing 203 guests on the forum who were not logged in. I am certain that the majority of those were BOTS and webcrawlers, trying to steal user information. The area of the forum with your user / personal details is totally secure, but these intruders slow it down.


I recently took up the practice of banning certain IP addresses from the forum. I cleared the IP ban list yesterday as a member was having difficulty logging in. I will however, be rebuilding the IP ban list as I go along. If the indication is that the IP address is a BOT, as indicated in the photo above, then that address will be banned.

If you do encounter any difficulty logging in, use the 'contact us' box on the front of the forum and I will sort it out. If it says that it is because of your IP address, please ask google what your IP address is and let me know. Please include your user name in your 'contact us' message to me.

I had already disabled direct registration because BOTs and webcrawlers now know how to register on a forum. They always fail the security question miserably (naming the group 'Slade') and chuck in garbage random text. I normally ban their IP address and email as a matter of course. The nonsense user names and email addresses are a dead giveaway. But when you're getting 50 registration attempts a day, it's just a pain in the arse.

I HAVE RE-OPENED REGISTRATION, BUT IT NOW REQUIRES AN EXACT ANSWER IN THE Q&A FIELD.
We will see how that pans out.

If you have any queries, either PM me or use 'contact us'.

Cheers,
Ian


Examples:

The front page of the forum is quite telling, where it says "Most users ever online was 2546 on Tue Mar 24, 2026 5:02 pm"