Chris Perkins

And you're complaining?! I can count my bullets on 2 fingers.

They must have inherited their unusual surnames owing to a strong trait of an ancestor! It's in the genes.

I can understand that. You don't want 12 year old friends when you're already 14 I think that unless you go barmy adding all the 3rd party apps (many of which can be malicious) then you're generally alright. Every couple of months someone in a 3rd world country wants to be friends, but that's improved too. I now have eleven 'likes', including me! It may be one of those things that goes viral and tomorrow I'll have 30,000 likes!

By way of a further attempt to prevent spam bots registering and posting, I have now added an additional feature to the registration process. All new members are presented with the question: 'What sex is your biological father?' No computer is currently clever enough to read/understand that and correctly respond. And, should a clever one be invented in the future, we all know computers can't lie and don't have fathers, so that should stop them in their tracks either way! In fact, to go one further: I hope the concept of artificial intelligence deliberating on whether or not it has a biological father may cause a meltdown and stop spamming forever - and that would probably qualify me for a Nobel Peace prize.

Yes, had that since the upgrade to the latest version. I have no idea how they get past it. I can only assume there is some poor Indian chap sitting in an internat cafe entering CAPTCHA's all day long. Or, innocent internet users are presented with fake CAPTCHA's (via trojan/viruses etc that look like they are part of websites) that are actually linked to web registrations for forums etc, without them knowing it. Then the spam bots do the rest. No idea! Perhaps someone has developed software that can read them.

Oh my giddy aunt. Those were accounts that were created before I added the question. It seems they can now get around the CAPTCHA wierd text character input, but they really shouldn't be able to get around the question. I thought about banning certain email accounts, but there are also genuine people that use the free email accounts (gmail is the spammers favourite).

Sorry, didn't notice that. Should all be gone now? Every day about 25 spam accounts fail to get in (i.e. become members). It's a constant battle. I have a feeling that the spam bots are targeting websites more than peoples email these days.

Where? I thought I'd zapped everything. Point me at it.

Doesn't happen yet.... But paypal usage is pushed very hard on German ebay, too. They make it out to be the safest way to pay etc. That's rubbish of course, as any payment method is only as safe as the person you're sending the money to! The Germans were much more used to doing bank transfers than the people of GB. I remember the days when i used to get umpteen cheques a week! Anyway, it is a liberty that people are forced to use paypal. As paypal is owned by ebay, why can't paypal payments be free as ebay already get auction fees? Selling cheap stuff or tight margin items simply doesn't make sense anymore. A friend of mine was actually banned for going below the threshold on the DSR. He was reinstated after calling them, but probably only because his sales value was pretty high.

As one of the founding members (back in the days when basically you me and young Oli used to use the forum for 3 way conversations!) you deserve a medal for that! And, so many interesting and very useful contributions too. I remain in your debt Sylvester. Top man. I think I was 25/26 when I started this. 32 now, and what a wonderful resource this place has become.

And the same from me! To the established members that I know and equally to the new faces.

Isn't that just a link farm website? It's only purpose seems to be to generate revenue from the ads. I could find no useful content.

I'm not really that much into World coins either though. And I expect it'll be 90% German.

Munich's a long way from me. I dunno, I'm not really into the German scene (after observing some time ago that all German dealers sell are over graded, over priced and over cleaned coins).

Oooo, I didn't know they'd put it on Amazon. The ISBN is right, but I don't know where they guessed the release date from! I better get my finger out.

I had the Sinclair thermal printer. It printed black burned digits onto a silver loo roll.

Who wouldn't like Kylie Minogue. I'm 32, but I haven't always been.

I'm afraid it's not ready yet. New house and lots of commitments have put me quite behind this year!

This morning (1 am UK time...I wasn't up!) I had an email from a user telling me that his antivirus software was reporting that the Predecimal.com forum was a malware threat! I checked and to me the forum was entirely text based and looked odd. Upon clicking on the text-topics I also had warnings about malware being detected (but blocked, so posing no risk). I asked my hosts and they confirmed that it did indeed look odd and that it had most likely been hacked somehow. So, what you're looking at now is a restored version of yesterday morning's forum directory! This means that anything posted in the last 24hrs (roughly) would have been lost, unfortunately. I have reported it to Invision, the forum software producer, but as it's weekend I'm not really expecting a lightening response. I've kept a copy of the hacked directory, so hopefully they can tell me what went wrong. I was running the newest version of the software. I'll leave it to run for the time being, but if members notice any strange goings-on, please email me and I'll have to take it offline and get the hole plugged up once and for all!

Yes, I re-sumbitted the website to google and it now has the all clear and is no longer blacklisted. I obviously don't know what the purpose of the redirects to malware sites were, but hopefully everyone here has good anti virus/malware protection (essential these days). It may also be a good idea for members to run a full scan on their PCs. I haven't noticed anymore spam than usual, but for extra security it may be an idea if users could ensure that their forum user name and/or email address and password are not the same as used for online banking, ebay, or other more sensitive areas! I've changed the website FTP password and the forum admin password. And in the next few days, will be updating the forum software to the latest version.

I re-submitted the site to google today. Hopefully it'll get the all clear.

Yes, pictures seem to be disappearing! There are a few technical issues that are not yet ironed out!

Thai, I believe.

12 Heller, issued by the Imperial town of Achen (that's just by reading it, I'm afraid I can't tell you much more).

I believe the incident has caused me (or at least the forum directory) to be blacklisted! There are no threats now but clearly browsers remember it and I expect google is also blacklisting this area. It makes me look bad doesn't it! I hope they realise very quickly that all is well.