Over the last few months we've been getting hit a lot by bots spidering this site and hitting us so hard that the service was being disrupted for users. On several occasions since about December the site went down or slowed to an intolerable speed sometimes for a few minutes but sometimes for a few hours.

Over the last couple of days there have been further problems with forum users getting error messages and being able to get into the site only by hitting refresh a few times.

This is just to let you know I'm working on it. I'm going to be shutting the forums down for an hour or two to make complete backups of the database. I'm then moving this site, at some considerable expense, to a dedicated server and making some back-end changes. That should sort all these issues out.

Please bear with me.