To stop this misuse of the forums, I have put a full ban on all IP addresses originating from the Russian Federation. People from Russia can still view the rest of the site, but they will get an access denied if they attempt to view the forums.

I don’t like doing this as it may cause a few real users problems, but it had to be done.

To all of you who have stuck with us through these difficult times, thank you and please accept my apologies for being so stubborn that I thought I could patch everything together with duct tape and keep it working.

In my defense, those are characteristics I learned in the Airborne.

I finally broke down, opened my wallet and took the time to move everything over to a new web host with room to grow. The various areas of the site will be coming back online over the next day or so, but I expect that I will miss things in the move. If you notice anything wrong with the site, please let me know by posting to the thread in the forums, to the comments on this story, or if all else fails emailing me at rob (at) prouse (dot) org.

Once again, thanks for your patience.

To reduce the amount of comment spam, I have decided to only allow comments in the photo albums to registered users. Unfortunately, that means another registration, username and password for everyone to remember.  It would be nice if the forums and the photo album users where linked, but they aren’t.

If I can find a decent anti-spam plugin for the gallery, I will rethink the user requirements. I hate to make it harder for you to comment on pictures, but it is necessary.

If anyone has trouble registering, please let me know.

Forum members can also contact me by sending a Private Message to Rob on the forums, but I tend to check those less often than the emails that are sent through the contact form.

These changes should reduce the amount of spam in my inbox and allow me to spend more time responding to queries instead of sorting through spam.

You may have noticed the lack of updates recently. I have been working hard in the background to redesign the site and move everything over to the new system. I hope that this makes the site easier to read and a little bit more pleasing to the eye. It definitely makes it much easier for me to update most of the pages, so hopefully I can now catch up on the site updates in my inbox and keep the site fresh in the future.

I hope you like the new site. You may notice a few pages here and there that still don’t fit in with the new design. I am reworking the pages as I get time and as soon as I am done, I will start putting up more new content.

Another great thing you will notice is that I have re-enabled commenting on posts and even on some pages, so tell the world what you think!

In other news, I have received numerous emails and pictures recently. I appologize to everyone for not getting back to you sooner, but I do have everthing stored away and ready to post to the site as soon as a get a few spare cycles.

I did this so that I could enable more advanced new-user confirmation when registering to prevent spam accounts. You need an account to post to this board and we now do more checks to ensure it is a real account, not a spam account.

You need a valid email address to create an account. An email with confirmation will be sent to your account. That email address will never be given out on this site and will only be used to get in touch with you regarding this site.

You also now need to enter letters and numbers from an image to create an account. The letters are case-sensitive and if you see an O, it is a letter.

Obviously, we are back up and hopefully it will be the last outage for awhile. If you sent email in the last week, it probably bounced and didn’t get through, so if it was important, please resend.