hi skippy,
It may be that 'john' is part of some kind of spamming attempt as he has registered multiple accounts from the same ip address using different emails and names.
We are not sure if this is related but this site has been the surprising victim of over 10 sustained hacking attempts over the last 8 months. Ranging from SYN flood, teardrop attack, IRC flooding, and other sophisticated DOS attacks. We have upgraded the firewall 3 times and upgraded the system architecture 4 times (you may recall the site has been slow from time to time). We host many sites across many different sectors and this is the only one that has had this very high level of hacking and attacks.
It does appear that for some reason there are people who would prefer that this forum/site did not exist! We have monitored the IP addresses of some of the less sophisticated hacking attempts and since these are traceable, we are considering legal action or a publicity campaign against those responsible.
If any of the responsible users of this forum suspect someone like 'john' of being a spammer then please let Andy know through his profile page:
http://www.iva.co.uk/andy_davie_profile.asp
We thank you for your vigilance and its a shame there are people out there who wish to ruin something that is so obviously helping so many people.
Admin Team
FYI: More info on hacking and attacks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack
