Due to the recent increase in spam bot activity, I have decided that to minimize the number of threads/posts aimed towards spamming, that several changes will be made to the current forum settings. I apologize for the way that things had to turn out, but I dont really see any other way of stopping these things...

Here are the changes:

Guests can no longer post in threads of any sort, nor will they be able to start a thread (previously in place). I will be setting it so that an admin must validate a registration, but if it turns out that admins need to validate their registration via email, then I may have to turn it off, because the last thing I want is the other admins getting hundreds of annoying emails from these forums for bot registrations.

Apparently someone is controlling these bots and watching them, because in order for the bots to post anything on the forum, they need to validate via email, which bots are (as far as I know) incapable of. The question is, who? Who could possibly have nothing better to do than sit in front of their computer watching hundreds, maybe thousands of email addresses and validating each registration manually?

I know that these changes may not be much, but I still have yet to find anything else I can do to put a cease to any future spamming.

I hate that things had to turn out this way, and this is mainly a nuisance to our forum's guests, as they will now have to register in order to make a post. I'm sorry for that, but you must understand that this is only happening due to recent bot events arounf the forums. I hope that this does not discourage you from posting, as your comments and suggestions are always appreciated, and read.

I'd just like to update on the bot status here. Since I have made the changes to the registration process, I have had only one more bot account attempt to get through, and that was within days after the change, and not one more since.

This would mean that whoever is sending the bots is watching the website themself, so I wouldn't be surprised if this person just decided to give up. This was the best explanation apart from saying that the bots (rouge internet spamming bots) became aware of what was going on and decided it was time to move on to another forum... but that doesn't make any more sense than the above.