Due to a small minority of users and the internet public, I have decided to discontinue giving guests the ability to write posts in any of the forums.

Prior to today, a visitor passing by could read the forums and "post a reply" immediately … only needing to fill in name/email and answering a simple mathematical question.

It appears that the hacking/spam community have already made software bots to be able to answer those math questions easily. This forum has been hit by spammers or link-farms in the past 2 weeks and I have been deleting them one-by-one.

They began with legitimate links and the most recent looked like absolutely made up URLs, that I'm guessing either don't exist – or if they do, contain viruses/trojans and that sort.

This has also affected the order of the topics as they appear in each forum.

Now, a person wishing to post to the forum must register as a user first. Then they will continue with the same process as before – just the mathematical question because we already have your name and email.

Hopefully, this will stop the spam forum postings. If not, I will look into other counter-measures. Personally, I dislike some of the visual captchas because I find it difficult myself to get some of those correct the first time.