For individual users, VPN's are wonderful tools for security - but they're hell for places like this.

While many VPN's claim the IP ranges they use are within the United States, my experience has proven this to be false.

I'm certain we've rejected (aka deleted) many legit new accounts due to our lack of being able to accurately vet them.

Then there are the actual malicious actors who come in from every weak IP they can find - and they find many. It's not unusual for us to find 3 new clearly malicious accounts created from the same subnet or even IP address in one day.

Many of you were here several years ago when our site, along with MANY others across the internet got hacked due to an exploit in the forum software. We were able to get patched, fixed and back online in a decent amount of time, but we'd like to never have to have that happen to the site again.

We try to keep our security efforts as low impact to the membership here as possible while making it as difficult as possible for the bad actors to have any real success. As I recently said in another thread, managing the site can be a difficult balancing act sometimes.

On a side note, I only had to delete 1 spam account today - but those foreign buggers don't celebrate Thanksgiving like we do so tomorrow is another day.