I was wondering when this would happen. But it was today when I first noticed the wave of ad spam posted in half of the forum areas.

I've removed as many that my moderator powers would allow. But it will happen again as long as the forum is open for guest posting.

Please consider closing the forum posts to members only. That way, the spammer will have to leave a much longer trail, a trail that he or she won't want followed. The time and effort to set up an account will usually put most casual spammers off anyway.

I took Max's advice and changed the forums permissions so that only registered users can create or reply to threads. That should help combat the spam problem, hopefully not at the expense of getting feedback from unregistered 'guests'.

I also posted a note in the HIPComix Information section if anyone wants to take a look-see.

does this action also affect the member sign ups that
are just links to junk sites. i went to the members
section today and clicked on a few links and almost
every member from 'new york' takes you to a junk site
and then it's hard to shut down my browser.

it sounds like you have a good plan to deal with the
spammers.

we don't need another crash, eh ?

thanks to both of you for your efforts to protect
the forum.

As far as I know this only affects a person's ability to post a message to the forum. You now have to be a registered member (and logged in) to do so. There shouldn't be any changes to the registration process itself.