You Have Chosen.Us

We’ve recently had a wave of fake users sign up for the forum. Most did not bother to post anything, but still used up server resources and clogged the member list with pointless users. The point of these users was to have a link to their website, thus improving their search engine placement (the more links to a site, the more popular it is, and according to search engine rules, the more popular it is the better it is). A measure is now in place to help prevent these signups.

Forum has now been updated to latest version, downtime less than a minute. You will most likely have to re-login.

Did a clean-up of the forum users. Quite an increase lately in sign-ups of (mostly) odd usernames, with a website. Before they were posting 1-3 bogus messages that could be used in most (but not all) situations to prevent their 0 post number to have them deleted, lately they’ve just made 0 posts. I suspect this is so that more websites (such as our member list page) will link to them, increasing their search engine page rank. Whether search engines have already dealt with this problem (such as excluding (select) forum links) doesn’t matter to me, we have few enough members that I can weed out this spam. If your username was one of the ten I deleted, sorry, but with no posts all that’s lost is the 1 minute it takes to sign-up.

WOOT! That last poll has over 100 votes! While I enjoy the vote count, it’s been up long enough so here’s a new one. Vote now! Hehehe…

phpBB has been successfully updated to version 2.0.20. Forum downtime was approximately 2 minutes.