Members,
This morning I have just disabled all new registrations to our forum indefinitely. This will not affect existing members at all, only new people who want to join.
It will also not affect anyone who wants to read the topics.
Over the past 6-8 months, Doug and I have had to deal with almost 10,000 new registrations, the vast majority of which are spammers. That's about 45/day. Many of these get handled by our automatic systems, but as the spammers try new tricks, we have to spend more and more time qualifying and monitoring them.
If we allowed these spammers to post here, our forum would quickly look like a garbage tip and we would be swamped with complaints from genuine members. There are also serious security risks involved for members who may follow the spammer's links.
These attacks go on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Doug and I have to be constantly vigilant to keep them at bay. It takes up much of our spare time, it's stressful, draining and leaves little time for working on maintenance and further development of the forum. It also adds massive bloat to our database.
The 'open door' policy we have adopted for the past 16 years has to end.
Doug and I will work out a new registration system to stop this nonsense. But it will take a while to put together and we won't be rushing it. All new members will have to provide a lot more information and demonstrate a genuine interest in Douglas machinery.
If you have any ideas, comments or suggestions, you are most welcome to post them below.
And if you know a genuine Douglas person who wants to register, contact us via PM and we will work with you to register them manually.
Dave
Site Admin