I've been bumped off the forum!

[Tim Green]

There is a lot of nasty activity going on on the web just now. Several major sites using the phpBB forum software, including the main phpBB site itself, have been hacked by exploiting vulnerabilities in web server software. It is also possible that some hackers are performing automated attacks by masquerading as Google web scanning spiders. This is not certain, but it is possible -- some of the "Google" activity recently has been very strange and very untypical of Google's genuine spiders, which are normally very well behaved.

For all these reasons I am watching the forum traffic very closely at the moment. I have banned most search engine spiders, including Google until the masquerading issue is cleared up. I will also immediately ban the IP of any visitor who appears to be behaving strangely in any way, without asking any questions or giving any warnings. For example, if a visitor remains in the login screen for more than a couple of minutes their IP will get banned because I assume that this is not a genuine login attempt.

If you get locked out of the forum because of this I apologize in advance, but quite frankly I prefer to be safe than sorry just now. The Net isn't the nice friendly place it used to be...