Forum was closed a short time, due to spam. Open now!

[SnuggleHam]

Alright!!! ... first I apologize for closing the forum down without warning. Hamster Central has been experience massive amounts of spammers as I'm sure for of you have unfortunately seen. I have been trying to find way to battle this issue, but it got to a point where I just had to close the forum down a while so I could look into this issue with my husband Smoo (smoo is my computer tech dude and husband) and they were I deleted them all the questionable posts and banned the users. Then I closed the forum! I couldn't leave it open with the amount of spam attacks coming in.

So Smoo helped me figure out what we could do. Apparently we needed to update AGAIN to the latest version, which we thought we did! so now the forum is up to date! The forum now has a new visual confirmation that's supposed to keep out spam bots. IN addition to this, I have enabled a new feature where new members will have their posts queued for approval for the first four posts they make on this forum. Admin and Mods can approve these posts. My reasoning is spam bots aren't going to post fake content to get approved, and I doubt any real person is going to spend the time faking us out. If any spam does get in, it should be caught in this area, and the HC population will never see it.

This might be a pain for legit users, but after four posts are approved they wont be required to wait the queue any longer, and their posts beyond that will just show.

Oh and forum is open again! Please let this work! *crosses fingers*