Inevitably, as the forum increases in popularity, spammers will attempt to gain access to these boards for the purpose of posting links to pornography, illegal pharmaceuticals etc. We are getting a dozen or so spam applications for membership each day at the moment. If we let them in, they will literally fill the forum with hundreds of posts that have nothing to do with labradors and often make little sense. We have therefore taken steps to keep the forum clean from spam, but some of this steps may inconvenience genuine would-be members and that is what this announcement is all about No-one can join this forum until their application has been scanned by an administrator. This causes a brief delay, please accept our apologies for this, but is important in the fight against spam. Every time a spammer attempts to gain access to the forum, we ban their IP address. However, we do not just ban the complete address, we ban a range of addresses similar to the one causing the problem. If we do not do this, the spammer simply uses another similar address to spam again. The problem with this approach is that occasionally a genuine person will find their IP address has been banned. If this happens to you, you can post as a guest in the technical and help section, to let us know, and we will try and resolve the problem. Pippa
