The key thing going on here is that our vBulletin copy is outdated. I've been trying to stall upgrading as long as possible because the costs on vBulletin keep going up and up and up, ($209 per year just for the upgrade.. these guys are making out like bandits) and I really don't want to put us through another fundraiser as I know those are annoying. We are bringing in Google ad money again but that's just enough to cover hosting. If anyone wants to bankroll the vBulletin costs I'd be willing to bring us up to vBulletin 5, but I think the best use of our available money and my own reserve is to migrate us out of the vBulletin treadmill and into SMF or phpBB, or something else as robust if it's out there.
Regarding Post New Message issues, that is definitely important, but I can't seem to duplicate it; I posted to the Weather forum and it worked fine. I went ahead and rebuilt all of the forum indexes in hopes that this is the issue. If that still doesn't fix it I will need some guidance as to what error is coming up, from which button, and in which forums. I also will see what's going on with TapaTalk.
The weird usernames are spammers. They are hitting us hard.. there have been 5160 signups that have never been confirmed, for example, and 2/3rds of that were in the past month. The reason for this is probably because it was suggested we retire the human validation question and reinstate Captchas to try to cut down the spamming, and I figured it was worth a try. Looks like we got the opposite response, so I'll be putting it back. It's possible some of the slowdowns may be due to automated queries from them; I'll check the logs and if necessary we can start blocking China in the htaccess files. In any case, our mods are on the ball to make sure that those who do confirm their e-mail and have questionable new user essays don't get any posting privileges. We periodically flush out the unconfirmed accounts, and I've done this right now, getting rid of 4300 junk accounts.
Tim
