Just a small point to remember in the future. Bear with me if you find this a bit techy and wordy!

Most if not all forum admins are fighting a constant and ever-changing battle to prevent would-be spammers from signing up. Thanks to some excellent anti-spam measures put in place by Ian, and vigilance on the part of our webmasters and the rest of the committee, very few get through here, despite up to two dozen attempts a day.

When you go online, you're assigned an IP Address (a unique ID for your computer). IP Adresses consist of four blocks of one, two or three digits, separated by dots, e.g. 123.45.67.89. Usually, but not always, the first three blocks will be the same every time you go online.

We have a lot of anti-spammer measures in place, and one of those is to ban the first three blocks of the IP Address the would-be spammer used. In the above example we would block 123.45.67.

Recently there have been several cases of bona fide Members and Users finding themselves banned because a spammer has happened to have been using the same three blocks of the IP Address that they've got.

If you should ever find yourself banned from our forums, that's probably the reason. The first step to take is to contact me directly if you're able to, or use the committee email address on our website if you can't do that, and include the IP Address you have at the time. We'll then check, and if the above is the problem we'll remove the appropriate IP blocks, which will let you back in again.

You can check your own IP address at http://whatismyipaddress.com/

The above url will give an accurate result for direct connections to an ISP and for most proxy servers.

It's very unlikely that this will ever happen to many people, but please make a mental note that if you do find yourself banned, that's probably the reason, and it will help us sort the problem quickly if you include the IP Address you're using at the time.