Hello everyone!
We are under spam-attack of very sophisticated bots and I must to change our forum's user permissions to deflect this attack.
Normally we had 3 grades of users below admins and moderators: Unregistered / Users Awaiting Email Confirmation / Registered Users (almost all are in this last group for now) .
Starting today I will implement 3 more groups: Newbies (less than 3 days here or less than 5 posts) - Advanced User ( longer than 3 days here and more than 5 posts) - Senior Users (more than 180 days here and more than 100 posts and more than 100 points of reputation).
Permission for Registered users will be very limited: no private messaging, no avatars, no signatures, no... let's say: Registered Users will have almost no rights, except text-posting and reading, and even posting will be 100% via moderation till their promotion to Advanced Users.
Advanced Users will have the same rights what all you have now, so mostly changes will be in the name of the group where almost all of you are.
Senior Users will have more permission on the forum (more messages in PM, more bigger limits for uploading pictures and some other "candies".
Why I wrote this message then? Because each group has around 150 different settings, because promotion from one group to another will be done by robot. It will promote you all to Advanced Users group soon. So some mess may be expected for first few days. In case you will meet some errors or restrictions which you hadn't at past - please feel free to write it below this post (preferable), or contact me via PM or via contact form at the bottom-right corner - gray menu "Contact Us" point.
Sorry for troubles and thank you for understanding.
Moses