> Sorry I took longer than usual to deal with this. I suspect the days where anybody can post under any username are over. I think I'll set up the board here to tie in with RinkChat's account database, so that if you're registered for one, you're registered for the other. Then the /ban and IP controls of one will apply to the other as well. It would mean that in my absence, those of you who are RinkChat ops would be able to do an IP ban that would take effect in the forum. I'll have to think about how to manage the moderation of posts that have already been made. There are plenty of ways to handle that, and it's just a matter of deciding on the best one.

To add a bit of insight if desired: one of the other forums I moderate recently went through a "growing pains" period where we were seeing a lot more spam-bots blowing through the registration process (it's an arms race; as the anti-spam-bot technology improves, so does the technology the spam-bots have to defeat it). The admin team had a bit of a powwow to discuss what we were going to do about it, and specifically how to take some load off the mods. One thing we found that worked startlingly well was "trick questions" on the registration form (we use phpBB, which has a "profile" section as standard at registration): standard profile stuff with a big disclaimer above it that says "leave all this blank - if you fill any of it in, your account will not be created." The actual people signing up see the disclaimer and don't put anything in the fields, but the robots don't.

It's pretty simple, and catches a surprising number of automated registrations. If you're beefing up security around here, you might want to look into something like that.