Its a new feature to keep the spammers out. Ive been manually going through and trying to activate accounts that seem legitimate and deleting all the rest, sometimes I would get over 15 spammers in a day! But due to being busy in RL sometimes I could get to them and people would be waiting on an account activation for a while.
With this new feature people have to ask to be invited to the forum. When you go to register an account, the first thing you see it the terms of agreement, and in big letters on this page reads..
NOTE: To ensure a safer experience for our members, Hamster Central now uses an invitation-based registration system. Please use the contact form to request an invitation.
So people that pay attention and actually read the text before registering would have to send me an email, at which point, I send them one back with a invitation code. Thus keeping out the spam bots. :P So please have your cousin read it again carefully and send me an email via the contact forum like the direction ask, and I will hook them up with the code