[pete]

We've done some spam cleaning on the forums. If things are not working correctly or if we broke something please let us know.

A common forum spam is to register in a forum and add a signature with a link to a spam site. Nothing is posted and the reason people do this is to increase the number of links to the spam site. This increases the likelyhood of Google and other search engines to refer people to the spam site.

We have seen an increasing number of these signature spams here on the forums. Cleaning away this manually is now too much work and instead we will automatically clean away these spammers regularly.

Today I ran an SQL query to delete all users who have not posted anything but have a signature set. There were about 1,000 such users. 98% of these are spammers. 2% are probably legitimate users that have registered and added a signature, but haven't yet posted any messages. If you are one of the few legitimate users that we deleted please accept our apologies and please go ahead and register again.

We might also soon change the setup of our forum to not allow a signature to be set until a certain number of posts have been made.