Hello everyone,

On March 22nd, 2006 Warsailors came under a massive spam attack, with hundreds of messages hitting all three forums installed here in the span of only a few hours and overwhelming us completely. As many of you who have regularly visited this site know, Siri, the webmistress (and my mother), has had to delete individual spam message for some time, a rather annoying task. With this massive attack, however, it was simply unreasonable to delete them all by hand.

In order to deal with this problem we decided to upgrade our aging Phorum from the 3 generation to the new Phorum 5, something we have put off for some time now. The biggest change with the new phorum installation is that we will now require registration for all contributors (anyone can read messages). That means that all those who wish to create new topics or reply to messages must register as a user on this forum and confirm their registration via a confirmation email before becoming a "member" of the forum. We understand that this added minor inconvenience, which need only be done once, may potentially reduce the number of new faces seen on the forum, as many simply don't want to go through the bother. However, when weighed against the cost of an increasingly time consuming fight against spam, we believe this to be the only reasonable choice. Requiring registration may mitigate future spam issues and give us more tools to fight unwelcome guests and script bots from diluting the forum with filth and advertisements.

To register as a user here for the first time, simply go to this link:

[warsailors.com]

Enter your email address and a preferred username and password (this way you can conveniently log in from any computer). When you press the "submit" button, you should receive an email from Phorum in which there is a link. Going to that "confirmation" link will activate your user. After this, as long as you are logged in, you may post new topics, reply to messages and edit messages you have previously submitted.

Additionally, you will notice that once logged in, you have access to a new "My Control Center" where you may customize certain features and settings.

Other Notes:

1) I will try to get to restoring our original design and colors some time in the next few days or at most a few weeks.
2) As you may notice, the forum is now located at:

[www.warsailors.com]

instead of the old www.warsailors.com/phorum/ - consider updating your bookmarks. I will however, next week set up forwarding so that anyone going to the old link will be forwarded to the new address.

--
K. M. Lawson
[konrad.lawson.net]