due to the recent huge influx of russian spammers, several safeguards have been instituted within the forum software.
1 - all new registrations must be approved by an admin.
2 - a post "flood gate" of 180 seconds was imposed on all IP addresses. this means that spammers can't use software to shotgun dozens of posts into a thread within seconds. that caught several "dormant" spammers - russian registrations that were left unused until the registration approval was set, and then were activated by the russians to spam our forum. a "flood gate" means that no posts or messages can be created in less than 3 minutes. that number has now been changed to 15 seconds.