To combat spam, I've tied in the RinkWorks Forum with the user account system on RinkChat. You may continue to read the forum anonymously, but if you want to post, you have to have a RinkChat account. Registering is no big deal, and once you do so, your browser will remember who you are. (If it forgets, you re-enter your username and password when you go to post a message, and as soon as you hit 'Preview Message', you'll be logged in again.)

So, if you post here but are not registered for RinkChat, I recommend registering now.

As part of this upgrade, RinkChat operators will be able to nominate posts for deletion. If they do so, the post will remain in place but become temporarily unreadable. Then, when I'm on again, I'll be able to review those posts nominated for deletion and either delete them or restore them.

This is potentially just step one towards spam-proofing the forum. There's nothing currently in place to prevent spambots from registering new RinkChat names and continuing to post spam here. However, the hard work is all done. At this point, if it becomes necessary, adding either captcha or email verification will be trivial.

Also, note that RinkChat's /ban and /cban functionality now extend here. RinkChat operators should note this. If a rash of inappropriate forum posts comes in from a single IP address or IP address range, you can go into RinkChat and /ban the address(es) to solve the problem.

This also means that if a user gets banned from chat, that user will be banned from the forum as well. Room-specific controls, like /evict, will not have an effect here.

Please feel free to post questions about the new setup.